Chapter II.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 238, 4 November 1876, Page 1

Chapter 11.

" Well, doctor," said the skipper, " you've con-trived to give us a start some !" This was said in the still-abiding darkness of our icy diggings, up on the shores of Cockburn Land. The skipper was a hard-skinned, long-headed, dry-spoken man, who hailed from Portland, Maine. He .seldom said much, and I doubt whether he ever thought much. But what he did say was generally pointed, and considered by his crew conclusive ; and what he did think was as hard and dry as New England itself. He and the rest had been roused up in the middle of the long, black, Arctic night by the cry of horror 1 had uttered as my brother's face appeared to me and faded away, in the vision I have tried to describe. In the excitement of my early recovery from a swoon or trance into which I fell, I had told the story as well as I could to the skipper, in the hearing of several of our ship's company. Thus it was that, when 1 had recovered from the first effects of my extraordinary experience, he began an address to me in the words — " Well, doctor, you've con-trived to give us a start some." I made such apologies as occurred to me, in the best way I could ; but, long before I linished, I saw the skipper would uot be content without a fairly protracted catechetical examination of the deliniquent, as his manner was in all cases of innovation upon or disturbance of the established usages of his small community. I was not, therefore, surprised when he went on to say — " When, yew shipped with me at Portland, doctor, yewr conscience didn't spring yew amiyway to tell me there was madness in yewr fam'ly to hum ?" This was his key note, and he stuck to it, according to his habit. When the skipper, after serious deliberation, hit upon an idea, he clung to that idea for all time. On this occasion, the result of his cogitations was that I had developed symptoms of madness, and I am bound to say that, while the majority of our small company held the same opinion, 1- was myself unable to give any such account of my waking dream as could possibly restore their faith in my sanity. My only defence was_ that which I shall give to you. During live long weary months of the Arctic winter we remained prisoners ; and during that time, while all my comrades regarded me with undisguised suspicion, some openly ridiculing my belief in what I had seen, and others endeavoring to argue with me on the folly of what they naturally regarded as the hallucination of a diseased brain, I had no answer to their gibes or their reasons, or to my own halfincredulous mind, butthis which follows : — My brother Jack and I had been, from our earliest childhood, the best and closest of friends. We were the only children of our parents, Jack being my senior by about two years. Our mother died in giving birth to me, and our father, who had become first mate of an East Indiaman, was lost in a squall off the Cape nine years afterwards. Jack went to sea when he was fourteen years of age, and I began life as a doctor's boy. In course of time, my master took me as an apprentice, and so well did he discharge his duty to me, that before I had readied my twenty-fifth year I had passed my examination, and taken my diploma as a member of the College of {Surgeons. By that time I had seen Jack frequently ; and his manly, healthy condition, combined with his glowing accounts of the delights of life at sea, had confirmed my inclination to take to the sea. As soon, therefore, as I could secure my liberty, I obtained an appointment on board a Liverpool ship, and sailed as surgeon to the South Seas. Many changes followed. I passed from one vessel to another, and so did Jack ; until at length I joined the " Old Potomac," as I have said, and went northward, while Jack, as far as I could judge from his last letter, was sailing in the Mediterranean trade, between the Bosphorus and Mersey. But, long before this, events had occurred which powerfully induced me to look upon such visions as that which visited me in

the Polar Sea with more seriousness than J the reader would be disposed to indulge. Two of these events I will record as brieHy as I can. About six months before Jack iirst set out upon his life of adventure and hardship, 1 awoke one night from a deep sleep, with a ,_ sense of anxiety almost akin to terror. As soon as I became perfectly conscious, this strange feeling took the form of fear for my brother's safety. Jack and I slept in adjoining rooms. I sprang out of bed, and with great difficulty contrived to light my candle and hurry to Jack's bed-side. I was trembling violently, and so vivid was my apprehension of evil that for a second or more I was unable to summon courage to look at him. When 1 did look, he was sleeping calmly, with his right arm lying high above his head, and ■on his face a smile which snlliciently rebuked my fears and sent me back glad and silent to my chamber. But i could not rest. To and fro I tossed, imagining all kinds of horrible possibilities, till bed became intolerable to me, and dressing hastily, and creeping out by the back door, just as day was breaking, I dashed off into the fields. A lung ramble in the meadows and a dip into our favorite brook restored my spirits, and by the time I reached home I had succeeded in laughing oif my midnight terrors. But Jack did not present himself at breakfast that morning, and when our kind-hearted fostermother went to call him, she found him in the first stage of typhus fever. You may laugh at this instance, or you may reason with yourselves that the coincidence was fanciful. But wait. When Jack came home from his second voyage, instead of making iirst for our house, he went about to several other places, enquiring in an indirect and nervous fashion as to whether anything was known about me. When this came to my knowledge a day or two afterwards, 1, thinking there was some joke in it, laughingly asked him what it meant. Jack looked more serious than I thought necessary ; and then he fetched his " log," as he called it, and gave it me to read. This "log" was a book in which he had ptrt down from time to time notes of such matters as he had been interested in during his absence ; and when I came to a date about twelve months before his return, I found these words : " Port Phillip, Australia. Came to anchor at six bells. Been miserable all day, fancying something wrong with Brother Joe." As I read on I found note after note^expressing his fear that something serious had happened to me on that day when his ship arrived at Port Phillip. And when I compared the date with one I had too much cause to remember, I found that the very time when Jack had been so wretched about me was the time when I had got out of my depth in the river, and, all but drowned, was dragged ashore, more dead than alive. Now, two or three such coincidences as these would, I fancy, be likely to make an impression on less impressible natures than mine ; and, though I could mention others of the same kind, perhaps I have said enough to satisfy you that I had some reason for attaching more importance to that horrible waking dream about Jack and the murdering nigger than would seem natural to other people. That, however, was not the cifect of my explanations upon my fellow castaAvaysin the icy desert. If it were any part of my present design to tell the story of our sufferings in that pitiless region, there would be no lack of incident wherewith to horrify the reader. I could tell such tales of misery, privation, and death upon those plains of frozen sea as would chill the blood ; but my business is to follow out this strange history, which remains as incomprehensible to me to-day as when it became part of my experience of that perpetual miracle which we call Life. Let me, then, simply say that late in the spring of 18b' — , nearly nine months after the "Old Potomac," met her doom in Lancaster Bound, the few miserable survivors of her crew were rescued by a Yankee whaler, and carried home to Maine; and thus hasten on to the next stage of my tale.