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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Oi ha' bin thinking how we moight get over Polly's evidence agin me; every noight oi will get up regular and coom and ha' a talk wi' you; oi will coom out wi'out my shoes as quiet as a cat, and then if Polly sweers as oi didn't leave t' house that noight thou can'st sweer as she knows nothing at all aboot it, as oi ha' been out every noight to see thee."
I've fallen in with bergs with live polar bears on them in my time." "What is she a whaler?" said Mr. Sweers. "She's got a lumbersome look about the bulwarks, as though she wasn't short of cranes; but I can't make out any boats, and there's no appearance of life aboard her." "Let her go off a point," said the captain to the fellow at the wheel. "Mr.
I said to Halsted: "There was nothing in sight when I went below at eight bells. Where's that berg come from?" "From behind the horizon," he answered. "The breeze freshened soon after you left the deck, and only slackened a little while since." "What can they see to keep them staring so hard?" said I, referring to the captain and Mr. Sweers, who kept their glasses steadily levelled at the iceberg.
However, now that I was below, under shelter, out of the noise of the weather, and therefore able to collect my thoughts, I began to feel very hungry and thirsty; in fact, neither Sweers nor I had tasted food since breakfast at eight o'clock that morning. A lamp hung aslant from the cabin ceiling. It was a small lamp of brass, glazed.
I was surprised to find the tides an hour later than at Van Diemen's Inlet; their velocity, likewise, was increased to two knots; the flood-stream came from the north-east at the anchorage. July 7. At daylight, we left for Sweers Island; but owing to light winds, chiefly easterly, did not reach Investigator Road, between Sweers and Bentinck Islands, before the afternoon of the 8th.
How the liberation of the ship had come about neither Sweers nor I did then pause to consider. We were sailors, and our first business was to act as sailors, and as quickly as might be we loosed and hoisted the jib and foretopmast staysail, so that the vessel might blow away from the neighbourhood of the dangerous remains of her jail of ice.
In the middle of April, in the year 1855, the three-masted schooner Lightning sailed from the Mersey for Boston with a small general cargo of English manufactured goods. She was commanded by a man named Thomas Funnel. The mate, Salamon Sweers, was of Dutch extraction, and his broad-beamed face was as Dutch to the eye as was the sound of his name to the ear.
We guessed, however, that our trend was steadily southwards, by the steady cascading of the ice, by the frequent falls of large blocks, and by the increasing noises of sudden, tremendous disruptions, loud and heart-subduing as thundershocks heard close to. "If we aren't taken off," said Sweers to me one day, "there's just this one chance for us. The ice is bound to melt.
I unhooked it, and brought it to the light, but it was without a wick, and there was no oil in it, and to save time I stuck the lighted candle in the lamp, and leaving the other lamp burning to enable Sweers to rummage also, I passed through the door that was in the forepart of the cabin; and here I found three berths, one of which was furnished as a pantry, whilst the other two were sleeping-places, with bunks in them, and I observed also a sheaf or two of harpoons, together with spades and implements used in dealing with the whale after the monster has been killed and towed alongside.
Sweers and I stood, first of all, to take a view of the barque for a barque she was: her topgallantmasts down, but her topsail and lower yards across, sails bent, all gear rove, and everything right so far as we could see, saving that her flying jib-boom was gone. There was no need to look long at her to know that she hadn't been one of Franklin's ships.
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