Early Mom in the North 149 



And so, some reluctantly and some in panic, the company pre- 

 pare to abandon ship, clutching what possessions and food they can 

 gather in the turmoil. They crowd the rail in her belly, awaiting 

 the command of the captain with what fortitude they can muster. 



Just at this moment, however, the battered ship crashes against 

 an ice floe so large that, although heaving up and down hke the rest, 

 it does not tilt or plunge below the waves. At a single shouted com- 

 mand every man scrambles upon the rail and, dangling by loose 

 ropes, awaits his chance to leap to the ice. Not all are successful, and 

 with screams of horror, first one and then another slips and falls be- 

 tween the ship and the ice, to disappear instantly into the black 

 waters below and be crushed to a pulp. Soon all survivors are hud- 

 dled on the ice, the last to leap in safety being Captain Burkett, who 

 stayed to plead with Jonas Lodge to follow the company, but that 

 man remained adamant to his former seafaring tradition, and as the 

 now half-sunken ship slowly drifts away among the churning ice 

 blocks, they see him still standing upon the poop, his back to them 

 and his shoulders hunched. Slowly ship and man fade behind the 

 snowy murk and disappear together forever. For a day and a night 

 the company huddle on the ice floe as great hunks are split away so 

 that its size ever shrinks. As the raging of the elements subsides, how- 

 ever, the men find themselves in an even worse plight, abandoned 

 almost without food and still in the middle of the channel. 



But when the waters calm down sufficiently. Captain Burkett 

 decides upon a desperate course. The Basques have brought their 

 harpoons with them and he orders them to capture a small ice floe. 

 When one is held alongside their raft, he has crude paddles made by 

 tying lengths of canvas between two harpoons held apart at the end 

 by the scabbards of jackknives, and then ordering his first mate to 

 take as many men aboard this crude raft as it will carry, he sets them 

 adrift with orders to try to paddle to the nearest shore or to 

 wherever the ice is packing up and freezing together. It is a desperate 

 move, but the only one left to them, and fearfully those remaining 

 watch the wobbling thing pull slowly away over a channel of dark 

 water. But almost immediately disaster even more terrible than any- 

 thing that has yet occurred to them strikes unexpectedly. 



When still only a few yards off, the Httle ice raft suddenly upends, 

 and while the desperate men slowly slide into the icy waters, an 



