880 BACKWARD WE GO, — SLOWLY BACKWARD. 
in our rear was the lax’gest and most gloomy-looking of 
those downward-leading caves. It was large enough, had 
our masts been taken out, to receive the entire hull of 
the steamer into its capacious jaws; and toward these 
capacious jaws we were now being urged by a power 
•wdiich the advancing land — slowly-advancing, but still 
advancing — told us was greater than our means of resist- 
ance. 
Send the best helmsman to the w’heel. Crowd the 
furnaces with coal and pitch. Jam down the safety- 
valve. Any thing for steam ! — for steam and close steering 
are now the only things that can save us. 
Backward we go, — slowly back\vard ! The old craft, as 
if conscious of the shattered timbers and mangled forms 
which but await lier touching to spring into existence, 
trembles in every joint as the tortured boilers bear their 
increasing power against the whirling screw, — seventy 
revolutions to the minute, I think, we were then making, 
— and yet backward, slowly backward, toward the yawn- 
ing death. It was sickening to see a patch of sea-weed, 
or a drifting log, pass us in their unconscious career and 
in less than a minute of time disappear upon the breast 
of the diving flood, — down, down, how far? 
Even the whales that had been rubbing their huge 
sides against our barnacled copper for the last few days 
gave one plunge deeper than the rest, and left man to 
lean upon his whirling screw and die — alone. The nu- 
merous varieties of the arctic duck, which had heretofore 
spotted the calm and polished surface of the ocean in 
every direction, were now no longer to be seen between 
us and the nearing danger. There were thousands of 
