his was the longest I ever passed through. I did
truly believe that the day was never to break again over the ocean. I
must have gone from the fire to the deck thirty or forty times. The
schooner continued upright. I had no fear of her oversetting; she sat
very low, and the ice also showed but a small head above the water, and
as the body of it lay pretty flat, then, even supposing its submerged
bulk was small, there was little chance of its capsizing. I also noticed
that we were setting seawards--that is to say, to the westward--by a
noticeable shrinking of the pallid coast. But I never could stay long
enough above to observe with any kind of narrowness, the wind being full
of the wet that was flung over the ice-wall and the cold unendurable.

All night I kept the fire going, and on several occasions visited the
Frenchman, but found him motionless in sleep. I kept too good a look-out
to apprehend any sudden calamity short of capsizal, which I no longer
feared, and during the watches of that long night I dreamt a hundred
waking dreams of my deliverance, of my share of the treasure, of my
arriving in England, quitting the sea for ever, and setting up as a
great squire, marrying a nobleman's daughter, driving in a fine coach,
and ending with a seat in Parliament and a stout well-sounding handle to
my name.

At last the day broke; I went on deck and found the dawn brightening
into morning. The wind had fallen and with it the sea; but there still
ran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailors'
language, you would have shown your top-gallant sails to. I could now
take measure of our situation, and was not a little astonished and
delighted to observe the island to be at least a mile distant from us,
and the north-east end lying very plain, the ocean showing beyond it,
though in the south-west the ice died out upon the sea-line. That we had
been set away from the main by some current was very certain. There was
a westerly tendency in all the bergs which broke from the island, the
small ones moving more quickly than the large, for the sea in the north
and west was dotted with at least fifty of these white masses, great and
little. On the other hand, the wind and seas were answerable for the
progress we had made to the north.

The wall of ice (as I call it) that had stood over against the larboard
bow was gone, and the seas tumbled with some heaviness of froth and much
noise over the ice, past the bows, an