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Updated: June 22, 2025
The men on the Selache knew this, and it was to their credit that they obeyed when Dampier gave the word to put the helm up and trim the sheets over. Wyllard, however, stood a little apart with a hard-set face, and he looked forward over the plunging bows, for he was troubled by a sense of responsibility such as he had not felt since he had, one night several years before, asked for volunteers.
Wyllard was limping painfully, with his boots worn off his feet, when one morning they came into sight of a low promontory which rose against a stretch of gray lifeless sea. His heart throbbed fast as he realized that behind it lay the inlet into which Dampier had arranged to bring the Selache. He glanced at Lewson, who said nothing, and they plodded forward faster than before.
He obviated that difficulty by dividing his orders among the whole of them, and buying as little as possible. Dampier, however, proved an adept at the difficult business, and eventually the schooner Selache crept out from the Narrows at dusk one evening under all plain sail, painted a pale green, with her big main-boom raking at least a fathom beyond her taffrail.
A puff of spray that blew into his face disturbed his meditations, and when a little tumbling sea splashed in over the weather bow, he helped the others to haul down a reef in the mainsail. That accomplished, he went below and brought out a well-worn chart. The Selache drove away to the westwards over a white-flecked sea.
Next day the wind fell lighter, but for a week it still held westerly, and after that it blew moderately fresh from the south. Crippled as she was, the Selache would lie a point or two south of east when they had set an old cut-down fore-staysail on what was left of her mainmast. The hearts of her crew became lighter as she crawled on across the Pacific.
The Selache, for the most part, steered herself, lifting buoyantly while the froth came sluicing aft from her tilted bows, falling off a little with a vicious leeward roll when a comber bigger than usual smote her to weather, and coming up again streaming to meet the next.
After that he waited two days, until a strong breeze blew him off the ice, which was rapidly breaking up, and then stood out for open water, where he hove the Selache to for a week or so. Then he proceeded northwards to the inlet fixed upon.
When creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of grayish white that swung with the dim, green swell. The Selache was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then, and Dampier glanced at the ice with a feeling of deep anxiety. "Earlier than I expected," he commented. "Anyway, it's a sure thing there's plenty more where that came from."
When the snow cleared for a minute or two, they saw that Dampier had driven the Selache further off the ice. The schooner was hove to now, and there was a black figure high up in her shrouds. A bitter rush of wind hurled the spray about them, and the boat fell off almost beam-on to the sea, in spite of all that they could do.
The haze crystallized on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything on the Selache to the topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice.
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