hip's come down
somewhere from out of the North Pole. She never could have struck the
ice and gone ashore as we see her there. She's been locked up; then
the piece she's on broke away and made sail to the south. 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. Sweers, she'll be worth looking at," he continued, slowly
directing his gaze round the sea-line, as though considering the
weather. 'You've heard of Sir John Franklin?'

"Have I heard?" said the mate, with a Dutch shrug.

"It's the duty of every English sailor," said the captain, "to keep
his weather eye lifting whenever he smells ice north of the equator;
for who's to tell what relics of the Franklin expedition he may not
light on? And how are we to know," continued he, again directing his
glass at the berg, "that yonder vessel may not have taken part in that
expedition?"

"There's a reward going," said Mr. Sweers, "for the man who can
discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party."

The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.

We drew slowly towards the iceberg, at which I gazed with some degree
of disappointment; for, never before having beheld ice in a great mass
like the heap that was yonder, I had expected to see something
admirable and magnificent, an island of glass, full of fiery
sparklings and ruby and emerald beams, a shape of crystal cut by the
hand of King Frost into a hundred inimitable devices. Instead of
which, the island of ice, on which lay the hull of the ship, was of a
dead, unpolished whiteness, abrupt at the extremities, about a hundred
and twenty feet tall at its loftiest point, not more picturesque than
a rock covered with snow, and interesting only to my mind because of
the distance it had measured, and because of the fancies it raised in
one of the white, silent, and stirless principalities from which it
had floated into these parts.

"Get the jolly-boat over, Mr. Sweers," said the captain, "and take a
hand with you, and go and have a look at that craft there; and if you
can board her, do so, and bring away her log-book, if you come across
it. The newspapers sha'n't say that I fell in with such an object as
that and pa