CHAPTER III. DROPPING ANCHOR. Pass we the joys and sorrows sailors find As breezes rise and fall and billows swell; Till on some jocund morn-Lo, land, and all is well." "All hands on deck !" now boomed in drum-like tones in the ears of waking and sleeping,* alike rousing from lethargy and from sleep. There is no place where the somnolent are endowed with, such acute hearing as at sea. Soon all of us were Reefing some sails, on deck or scrambling aloft. setting others, and making hurriedly all the required changes to catch the wind from an altered course, was the business that now engaged us. Then, after a brief interval, in which time had been allowed for the accomplishment of all these, came a parallel mandate gruffly bawled by our commander to the helmsmen: "Keep her east!" which order was obeyed promptly as issued. The fact is, promptitude in the fulfillment of orders is one of those prime habits that have to be assumed on board a ship, no matter where else they may have been held in slight. "Do your duty at once," is a monosyllabic maxim which he has to there pick up and constantly put in practice, no matter how trifling Jack may have, in former days, considered it. And "Aye, aye, sir," is the word he generally utters, not more in accompaniment with the design understood, as with part of its execution then begun, or with its entire completion. Squals and gusts, and consequent reefing and hauling, do not await his leisure; no more do the officers on deck, who are issuing commands and seeing them obeyed. And if stimulus be at any time wanting to impress thispractical truth upon his notice, or cause him to illustrate it more fully, neither is that far to find. A rope's end or a belaying-pin is always at hand, and may be used for that purpose. But it was seldom in my experience necessary in that way to use either. A sailor's education has no more plainly written lesson included within it; and if the scholar gives the least sign of not having coned it properly, if he makes any undue pause over it, a volley of billingsgate poured like grape-shot about his ears is generally found sufficient to stir him up. to perfection. Immediately, like monkeys in the limbs and branches of an arbor, the men were seen scampering up the ratlin, scrambling in the rig ging, or half hid amid the shrouds, busy amid the knotted cordage and the flapping canvas ere the orders had died upon the blast or were swept on ahead. For a brief interval the little craft paused, as if on a sudden struck with indecision, -a coquette looking one way, while with half-amind kind of air turning the other. It was only for a momentary space, when swinging slowly round in gentle obedience to the admonitions of her rudder, she once more, with an animated dip of her prow, luffed to the wind, her sails bellying out as she breasted the waves obliquely. With the land just sighted, a speck on the horizon, well upon the larboard, she now made. direct for Cumberland Gulf, one of those deep, tortuous, rugged recesses of the sea with which the western shores of Greenland are so aboundingly indented. All aloft were now to rights and we had descended; those whose turn below it was diving into their still warm berths in the forecastle. Another hour or two, marked by the striking bell, fleeted by, and the jagged reefs which signal the opening to the gulf began to loom up before us like the backs of companionable seal roaming over their play-ground-ocean's daisyless meadows; but as we came nearer, and they into plainer view, we recognized them as what they were: rocky islets, well-worn precipices, and rounded hum mocks, very useful, doubtless, in furnishing some of the very lowest notes and the hoarsest, when the great storm King of the North puts on his royal vesture and goes forth to hold an oratorio upon the waves as in the days of Rollo, of the Vikings and of the Scalds. He singing his anthem of power, and his courtiers joining in the wild chorus, whose melody is discord, this keyboard for the waves to strike might not then be wanting without being missed. We began to look for our channel through them, incontinently dreaming the while on the chance of being cast away upon them. Naked and rough, more forbidding, desolate spots could hardly be imagined; and admiration for their ragged grandeur, or a search for the sublime therein seemed equally preposterous. The very ideal seemed they to me of an ultima thule. But their natural, normal desolation, so to speak, enhanced by the mordacious horrors of an Arctic winter, would, I thought, be like crowning some frightsome gorgon with Madusa's shorn locks, a climax of dread capped indeed by a very quintessent horror. To live here for any length of time, from a week to a month, the guest of a forlorn hope till light had dimmed and the mobile waters around had become like adamant, admitting of being trod upon, and then to have to sally forth in search of some spot where humanity,-dear then in any form,-could be found, what a situation to be in! --what a doom to undergo! The thought that a few planks were between us and the realization of those dread imaginings gave a shudder to my reflections. By this time we had arrived pretty close to them; and already the course our vessel was about to take in going through them seemed pointed out by her prow and the finger of her figure-head. Two craggy cliffs on the right, some hundred feet over the rest, seemed like the sentinels of the entrance. On the left extended a low line of rock, over and against which the breakers heaved with ceaseless roar and surf. They were only a mile or two distant from us. Suddenly the wind shifted and then blew right in our teeth, that is, from the nor'-east. Our headway being thus abruptly stayed all hands were called to action as before. "Haul and reef!" was now the order promulgated; and again on deck and aloft between sea and sky, we gained the full advantage of fresh air so desiderated by me before and since when immured in a house. In as brief a time as is occupied in the relation of the event, we were lying to under a close-reefed mainsail. This implies that every bit of canvas was stowed away, except so much as was necessary to steady |