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Updated: June 22, 2025
There was nothing else, however; no schooner in the inlet, no boat upon the beach. In another moment or two they went down the slope savagely at a stumbling run, and then stopped, gasping by the water's edge, and looked at one another. There were marks in the sand which showed them where a boat had been drawn up not very long ago. The Selache had evidently been there, and had sailed away again.
In the feeble light, Wyllard's face showed gray except where a broad red stain had spread across it. Dampier cast a glance at him. "Get him below, and into his bunk, two of you," he commanded. The men carried him with difficulty, for the Selache lurched viciously each time a white-topped sea came up upon her quarter. As soon as it seemed advisable to leave the deck Dampier went down.
There is always a certain possibility of bringing a fore-and-aft rigged vessel's main-boom over when she is running hard, and this is apt to result in disaster to her spars. So fast was the Selache traveling that the sea piled up in big white waves beneath her quarter, and, cold as the day was, the sweat of tense effort dripped from Wyllard as he foresaw what he had to do.
The ice among the inlets on the American side of the North Pacific broke up unusually early when spring came round again, and several weeks before Wyllard had expected it the Selache floated clear. Her crew had suffered little during the bitter winter, for Dampier had kept them busy splicing gear and patching sails, and they had fitted her with a new mainmast hewn out of a small cedar.
Its ragged tongue was horribly close to lee of them lapped in a foaming wash when the snow cleared for a minute or two, and they saw that Dampier had driven the Selache further off the ice. She was hove to now, and there was a black figure high up in her shrouds.
The cold was not particularly severe when the Selache arrived, but when Dampier went ashore next morning to pick a log from which they could hew a mast the temperature suddenly fell, and that night the drift ice from the river mouth closed in on them. When the late daylight broke the schooner was frozen fast, and they knew it would be several months before she moved again.
Dampier waited two days until a strong breeze blew him off the ice, which was rapidly breaking up, and he then stood out for the open sea, where he hove the Selache to for a week or so. After that he proceeded northward to the inlet Wyllard and he had agreed to.
The Selache swung round, and he gasped with the effort to control her as she drove away furiously into the thickening snow. She was carrying far too much canvas, but they could not heave her to and take it off her now. The boat must be picked up first, and the veins rose swollen to Wyllard's forehead as he struggled with the wheel.
Lumps and floes of ice detached themselves from the parent mass, and sailed out to meet the vessel, crashing on one another, while it seemed to the men who watched him that Wyllard tried how closely he could shave them before he ran the Selache off with a vicious drag at the wheel. None of them, however, cared to utter a remonstrance.
The Selache was a little fore and aft schooner of some ninety-odd tons, wholly unprotected against ice-chafe or nip, and he knew that prudence dictated their driving her south under every rag of canvas now. There was, however, the possibility of finding some sheltered inlet where she could lie out the winter, frozen in, and he had, at least, blind confidence in his men.
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