blow, stormed up again into its first fury; and the
morning of the 1st of July, _anno_ 1801, found the _Laughing Mary_
passionately labouring in the midst of an enraged Cape Horn sea, her
jibboom and fore top-gallant mast gone, her ballast shifted, so that her
posture even in a calm would have exhibited her with her starboard
channels under, and her decks swept by enormous surges, which, fetching
her larboard bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty green masses over
her.

CHAPTER II.

THE ICEBERG.

The loss of the spars I have named was no great matter, nor were we to
be intimidated by such weather as was to be expected off Cape Horn. For
what sailor entering this icy and tempestuous tract of waters but knows
that here he must expect to find Nature in her most violent moods,
crueller and more unreckonable than a mad woman, who one moment looks
with a silent sinister sullenness upon you, and the next is shrieking
with devilish laughter as she makes as if to spring upon you?

But there was an inveteracy in the gale which had driven us down to this
part that bore heavily upon our spirits. It was impossible to trim the
ballast. We dared not veer so as to bring the ship on the other tack.
And the slope of the decks, added to the fierce wild motions of the
fabric, made our situation as unendurable as that of one who should be
confined in a cask and sent rolling downhill. It was impossible to light
a fire, and we could not therefore dress our food or obtain a warm
drink. The cold was beyond language severe. The rigging was glazed with
ice, and great pendants of the silvery brilliance of crystal hung from
the yards, bowsprit, and catheads, whilst the sails were frozen to the
hardness of granite, and lay like sheets of iron rolled up in gaskets of
steel. We had no means of drying our clothes, nor were we able so to
move as by exercise we might keep ourselves warm. Never once did the sun
shine to give us the encouragement of his glorious beam. Hour after hour
found us amid the same distracting scene: the tall olive-coloured seas
hurling out their rage in foam as they roared towards us in ranges of
dissolving cliffs; the wind screaming and whistling through our grey and
frozen rigging; the water washing in floods about our decks, with the
ends of the running gear snaking about in the torrent, and the live
stock lying drowned and stiff in their coops and pen near the caboose.

With helm lashed and yards pointed to th