er
bulwarks, and blindly hauled myself forward by such pins and gear as
came to my hands. A man might spend his life on the ocean and never have
to deal with such a passage as this. It was not the bitter cold only,
though perhaps of its full fierceness the wildness of my feelings did
not suffer me to be sensible; it was the pouring of volumes of water
upon me from over the rail, often tumbling upon my head with such weight
as nearly to beat the breath out of my body and sink me to the deck; it
was the frenzy excited in me by the tremendous obligation of despatch
and my retardment by the washing seas, the violent motions of the brig,
the encumbrance of gear and deck furniture adrift and sweeping here and
there, and the sense that the vessel might be grinding her bows against
the iceberg before I should be able to reach the bowsprit. All this it
was that filled me with a kind of madness, by the sheer force of which
alone I was enabled to reach the forecastle, for had I gone to my duty
coldly, without agitation of spirits, my heart must have failed me
before I had measured half the length of the brig.

I got on to the bowsprit nearly stifled by the showering of the seas,
holding an open knife between my teeth, half dazed by the prodigious
motion of the light brig, which, at this extreme end of her, was to be
felt to the full height of its extravagance. At every plunge I expected
to be buried, and every moment I was prepared to be torn from my hold.
It was a fearful time; the falling off of the brig into the trough--and
never was I in a hollower and more swelling sea--her falling off, I say,
in the act of veering might end us out of hand by the rolling of a surge
over us big enough to crush the vessel down fathoms out of sight; and
then there was that horrible heap of faint whiteness leaping out of the
dense blackness of the sky, gathering a more visible sharpness of
outline with every liquid heave that forked us high into the flying
night with shrieking rigging and boiling decks.

Commending myself to God, for I was now to let go with my hands, I
pulled the knife from my teeth, and feeling for the gaskets or lines
which bound the sail to the spar, I cut and hacked as fast as I could
ply my arms. In a flash the gale, whipping into a liberated fold of the
canvas, blew the whole sail out; the bowsprit reeled and quivered under
me; I danced off it with incredible despatch, shouting to the men to
hoist away. The head of the st