262 WHALING 



the ice cut him off. He had all hands on deck, port watch 

 forward, starboard watch aft, to work the ship in close quarters. 

 As she came into the wind, with the leadsman on the fore-chains 

 crjang that she still had water under her keel, ice suddenly- 

 loomed out of the falling snow hard under her weather bow. 

 She struck, hung in irons, drifted back, and went aground. 



Night had come; but in the lee of the ice the sea was as calm 

 as a pond. The men sprang aloft and handed the roaring 

 canvas; hastily launching a boat, they laid an anchor to wind- 

 ward and hauled the cable taut, to keep from driving farther up 

 on the shoals. There she lay, hard and fast, until daybreak, 

 when the others saw her predicament, and many boats and 

 great numbers of men came to her rescue from the vessels rid- 

 ing at anchor in the deep water beyond the point. 



They swarmed on the deck of the grounded barque, and leaped 

 with alacrity to the work at hand. With the sharp snap of 

 well-clipped orders, and with thundering old songs, they laid 

 out anchor after anchor, and carried the chains to the windlass 

 and hove them taut, and hoisted up casks of oil and rolled them 

 aft, until at last she floated. They kedged her off and towed 

 her out, and there for the last time she let go her anchor. The 

 work of that morning, given with all good-will, was work thrown 

 away, although no one then knew it; for the ice-pack was 

 swinging south upon the fleet, hour by hour, and the Monticello 

 was never to sail again. 



The weather cleared, and the boats went off up the coast for 

 whales. A boat from the Monticello first struck and saved one. 

 But the wind still blew from the west, and the ice still crowded 

 in upon the fleet. 



The Monticello had anchored in six fathoms, but the edge of 

 the ice, which already rested on bottom, was hard aboard her, 

 and was driving nearer the shore. 



On September 2d, the moving pack forced the brig Comet 

 against a grounded floe and with a deliberation that seemed 

 malicious, crushed her. Arctic whalers say that the grinding 

 and breaking up of the ice makes a scene that is strangely im- 

 pressive and a noise that is almost deafening. Combined with 



