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Toughen your fighters!" And once, when M. Radisson had passed beyond hearing, the governor turns with a sleepy laugh to the captain. "A pox on the rantipole!" says he. "May the sharks test the nerve of his marrow after he's captured back the forts!" In the bay great ice-drift stopped our way, and Pierre Radisson's impatience took fire. "What a deuce, Captain Gazer!" he cries.
"Hurray, we'll soon be free of the ice-drift," cried Harry, as they followed the boatswain forward and watched while he and several of the crew drilled holes in the ice and adjusted the dynamite on either side of the bow, at a distance of about two hundred feet from the ship in either direction.
Often did I in the severest winter of the southern hemisphere, endeavor, passing the polar glaciers westward, to leave behind me those two hundred strides out from Cape Horn, which sundered me probably from Van Diemen's Land and New Holland, regardless of my return or whether this dismal region should close upon me as my coffin-lid making desperate leaps from ice-drift to ice-drift, and bidding defiance to the cold and the sea.
The strait was already filled with ice-drift, and their vessels were brought to a standstill, after about a hundred and fifty English miles of progress beyond the Waigats; for the whole sea of Tartary, converted into a mass of ice-mountains and islands, and lashed into violent agitation by a north easterly storm, seemed driving down upon the doomed voyagers.
On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders called the Three Sisters a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from whence the boulders could have rolled down. Relics of an early ice-drift, perhaps. They are noble boulders.
At the edge lay always one on the watch; and no matter how dense the fog, these walrus herds on the ice, braying and roaring till the surf shook, acted as a fog-horn to Cook's ships, and kept them from being jammed in the ice-drift. Soon two-thirds of the furs got at Nootka had spoiled of rain-rot. The vessels were iced like ghost ships.
In opposition to the melancholy carman was the dictum of Mr. Gallagher, the great high-priest of Kennedy's tobaccos. He said "The poverty of Ireland is due to the fact that she has no coal. Geologists say that tens of thousands of years ago a great ice-drift carried away all the coal-depositing strata." "Another injustice to Ireland," interrupted a sacrilegious Unionist.
Occasionally, coming to a wall-like cliff surrounded by a tangled and trackless forest, they were forced to seek the shores of the sea, and there, among rocks and ice-drift, pick their way slowly along.
Glad to be off once more to the adventurous freedom of the wilds, he set sail from England on May 17, 1684, in the Happy Return, accompanied by two other vessels. No incident marked the voyage till the ships had passed through the straits and were driven apart by the ice-drift of the bay. About sixty miles out from Port Nelson, the Happy Return was held back by ice.
On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders called the Three Sisters a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from whence the boulders could have rolled down. Relics of an early ice-drift, perhaps. They are noble boulders.
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