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Once there, Anson Burlingame, with his gentle manner and courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of the burning of the vessel, followed by the long privation and struggle that had lasted through forty-three fearful days and across four thousand miles of stormy sea. All that Mark Twain had to do was to listen and make notes.
Nine hundred or more sea-otter whose pelts afterward brought a fortune to the crew were killed for food by Steller and his companions; but two sea-cows provided the castaways with food for six weeks. On November 22d died the old mate, who had weathered northern seas for fifty years.
In the former event, the castaways have small hope of remaining undiscovered. True, they are well concealed, not an inch of face or person is exposed; the captain and Seagriff alone are cautiously doing the vidette duty.
They realized his meaning, and hastened up the beach, out of reach of the water if it should come. And it did. At first the ocean retreated, as though the tide was going out, then, with a rush and roar, the waves came leaping back, and, had the castaways remained where they had been standing they would have been swept cut to sea.
Chirikoff was landed the same day, all unaware that at times in the mist and rain he had been within from fifteen to forty miles of poor Bering, zigzagging across the very trail of the afflicted sister ship. By December the entire crew of Bering's castaways, prisoners on the sea-girt islands of the North Pacific, were lodged in five underground huts on the bank of a stream.
Almost crazed by the sight, the castaways, overcoming their stupefaction, forgetting all that had gone before, danced frantically on the sand hill, their ecstasy knowing no bounds. "Will they see us?" she sobbed, falling at last to the ground in sheer exhaustion, digging her fingers feverishly, unconsciously into the sand. "Yes, yes! They must see us! We are saved! Saved!" he yelled hoarsely.
Men were coming and going; looking towards the rock and then running to fetch other men. After a while a party came down to the beach, launched a boat and rowed towards the wreck. How thankful were the hungry, shivering castaways to get into the boat and be rowed ashore by these sturdy Norman-French fishermen!
Wicks was amazed, but he naturally ventured no remark; and a little after, the six Currency Lasses sat down with Trent and Goddedaal to a spread of marmalade, butter, toast, sardines, tinned tongue, and steaming tea. The food was not very good, and I have no doubt Nares would have reviled it, but it was manna to the castaways.
The beach was strewn with bits of wreck and drift: some redwood and spruce logs, no less than two lower masts of junks, and the stern-post of a European ship; all of which we looked on with a shade of serious concern, speaking of the dangers of the sea and the hard case of castaways.
But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut; a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air, the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness, hurled in that direction a final malediction.
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