ice-loaded

Updated: May 2, 2025

I was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our noble ship was plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of tall and beetling cliffs.

William Clark Russell - The Honour of the Flag