Left on Labrador Part 10

"Not redder than yerself, cap'n," laughed Donovan, who greatly enjoyed their mystification.

"The sea is like blood!" exclaimed Wade. "You don't suppose the day of judgment has come and caught us away up here in Hudson's Straits, do you?"

"Not quite so bad as that, I guess," said Raed. "I have it: it's the aurora borealis; nothing worse, nor more dangerous."

I had expected Raed would come to it as soon as he had got his eyes open.

"A red aurora!" said the captain. "Is that the way you explain it?"

"Not a red aurora exactly," returned Raed, "but an aurora s.h.i.+ning down through the thick fog. The aurora itself is miles above the fog, up in the sky and probably of the same bright yellow as usual; but the dense mist gives it this red hue."

"I've heard that the northern lights were caused by electricity," said Weymouth. "Is that so?"

"It is thought to be electricity pa.s.sing through the air high up from the earth," replied Raed. "That's what the scientific men tell us."

"They can tell us that, and we shall be just as wise as we were before," said Kit. "They can't tell us what electricity is."

"Why!" exclaimed the captain, "I thought electricity was"--

"Well, what?" said Kit, laughing.

"Why, the--the stuff they telegraph with," finished the captain a little confusedly.

"Well, what's that?" persisted Kit.

"What _is it_?" repeated the captain confidently. "Why, it is--well--Hang it! I don't know!"

We all burst out laughing: the captain himself laughed,--his case was so very nearly like everybody's who undertakes to talk about the wondrous, subtle element. By the by, his definition of it--viz., that it is "the stuff we telegraph with"--strikes me as being about the best one I ever heard. Kit and Raed, however, have got a theory,--which they expound very gravely,--to the effect that electricity and the luminiferous ether--that thin medium through which light is propagated from the sun, and which pervades all matter--are one and the same thing; which, of course, is all very fine as a theory, and will be finer when they can give the proof of it.

After watching the aurora for some minutes longer, during which it kept waxing and waning with alternate pale-crimson and blood-red flushes, we went back to our bunks; whence we were only aroused by Palmleaf calling us to breakfast.

If there was any wind that morning it must have been from the east, when the crags of the island under which we lay would have interrupted it. Not a breath reached the deck of "The Curlew;" and we were thus obliged to remain at our anchorage, which, in compliment to the captain, and after the custom of navigators, we named _Mazard's Bay_.

As the inlet bore no name, and was not even indicated on the charts we had with us, we felt at liberty to thus designate it, leaving to future explorers the privilege of rechristening it at their pleasure.

"We shall have a lazy morning of it," Kit remarked, as we stood loitering about the deck.

"I propose that we let down the boat, and go ash.o.r.e on the island,"

said Wade. "'Twould seem good to set foot on something firm once more."

"Well, those ledges look firm enough," replied Raed. "See here, captain: here's a chap begging to get ash.o.r.e. Is it safe to trust him off the s.h.i.+p?"

"Hardly," laughed Capt. Mazard. "He might desert."

"Then I move we all go with him," said Kit. "Let's take some of those muskets along too. May get a shot at those wild-geese we heard last evening."

The boat was lowered. We boys and the captain, with Donovan and Hobbs to row us, got over the rail, and paddled to where a broad jetting ledge formed a natural quay, on which we leaped. The rock was worn smooth by the waves of centuries. To let the sailors go ash.o.r.e with us, we drew up the boat on the rock several feet, and made it fast with a line knotted into a crevice between two fragments of flinty sienite rock at the foot of the crags. We then, with considerable difficulty and mutual "boosting," clambered up to the top of the cliffs, thirty or forty feet above the boat, and thence made our way up to the summit of a bald peak half a mile from the sh.o.r.e, which promised a good prospect of the surrounding islands. It is hardly possible to give an idea of the desolate aspect of these ledgy islets.

There was absolutely no soil, no earth, on them. More than half the surface was bare as black sienite could be. Huge leathery lichens hung to the rocks in patches; and so tough were they, that one might pull on them with his whole strength without tearing them. In the crevices and tiny ravines between the ledges, there were vast beds of damp moss. In crossing these we went knee-deep, and once waist-deep, into it. The only plant I saw was a trailing shrublet, sometimes seen on high mountains in New England, and known to botanists as Andromeda of the heathworts. It had pretty blue-purple flowers, and was growing quite plentifully in sheltered nooks. Not a bird nor an animal was to be seen. Half an hour's climbing took us to the brown, weather-beaten summit of the peak. From this point eleven small islands were in sight, none of them more than a few miles in extent; and, at a distance of seven or eight leagues, the high mountains of the northern main, their tops white with snow, with glittering glaciers extending down the valleys,--the source of icebergs. There was a strong current of air across the crest of the peak. Sweeping down from the wintry mountains, it made us s.h.i.+ver. The sea was s.h.i.+mmering in the sun, and lay in silvery threads amid the brown isles. Below us, and almost at our feet, was the schooner,--our sole connecting link with the world of men,--her cheery pine-colored deck just visible over the sh.o.r.e cliffs. Suddenly, as we gazed, she swung off, showing her bow; and we saw the sailors jumping about the windla.s.s.

"What does that mean?" exclaimed Capt. Mazard. "Possible they've got such a breeze as that down there? Why, it doesn't blow enough _here_ to swing the vessel round like that!"

"But only look down the inlet!" said Donovan. "How wild it seems! See those lines of foam! Hark!"

A rus.h.i.+ng noise as of some great river foaming among bowlders began to be heard.

"It's the tide coming in!" shouted the captain, starting to run down the rocks.

The schooner had swung back and round the other way. What we had read of the high and violent tides in these straits flashed into my mind.

The captain was making a bee-line for the vessel: the rest of us followed as fast as we could run. Just what good we any of us expected to be able to do was not very clear. But "The Curlew" was our all: we couldn't see it endangered without rus.h.i.+ng to the rescue.

Panting, we arrived on the ledges overlooking the boat and the schooner. The tide had already risen ten or a dozen feet. The boat had floated up from the rock, and broken loose from the line. We could see it tossing and whirling half way out to the schooner. The whole inlet boiled like a pot, and roared like a mill-race. Huge eddies as large as a ten-pail kettle came whirling in under the cliffs. The whole bay was filling up. The waters crept rapidly up the rocks. But our eyes were riveted on the schooner. She rocked; she wriggled like a weather-c.o.c.k; then swung clean round her anchor.

"If it will only hold her!" groaned Capt. Mazard. "But, if it drags, she'll strike!"

Old Trull, Weymouth, and Bonney were at the windla.s.s, easing out the cable as the vessel rose on the tide. Corliss was at the wheel, tugging and turning,--to what purpose was not very evident. But they were doing their level best to save the vessel: that was plain. Capt.

Mazard stood with clinched hands watching them, every muscle and nerve tense as wire.

I was hoping the most dangerous crisis had pa.s.sed, when a tremendous noise, like a thunder-peal low down to the earth, burst from the ice-jammed arm of the inlet to the north-east. We turned instantly in that direction. The whole pack of ice, filling the arm for near a half-mile, was in motion, grating and grinding together. From where we stood, the noise more resembled heavy, near thunder than anything else I can compare it with.

"It's the tide bursting round from the north-east side!" exclaimed Kit.

"Took it a little longer to come in among the islands on the north side," said Raed, gazing intently at the fearful spectacle.

The noise nearly deafened us. The whole vast ma.s.s of ice--millions of tons--was heaving and sliding, cake over cake. It had lain piled fifteen or twenty feet above the water; but the tide surging under it and through it caused it to mix and churn together. We could see the water gus.h.i.+ng up through crevices, sometimes in fountains of forty or fifty feet, hurling up large fragments of ice. The phenomenon was gigantic in all its aspects. To us, who expected every moment to see it borne forward and crush the schooner, it was appalling. But the sea filling in on the south, added to the narrowness of the arm, prevented the jam from rus.h.i.+ng through; though a great deal of ice did float out, and, caught in the swirling currents, b.u.mped pretty hard against the vessel's sides. The schooner swayed about heavily; but the anchor held miraculously, as we thought. Once we fancied it had given way, and held our breath till the cable tightened sharply again. The grating and thundering of the jam gradually dulled, m.u.f.fled by the water. Our thoughts reverted to our own situation. The sea had risen within five feet of the place where we were standing. To get up here in the morning we had been obliged to scale a precipice.

"It must have risen fully thirty feet," said Kit. "What a mighty tide!"

"Why should it rush in here with so much greater violence than it does down on the coast of Ma.s.sachusetts or at Long Branch?" questioned Wade. "How do you explain it, captain?"

"It is because the coasts, both above and below the mouth of the straits, converge after the manner of a tunnel. The tidal wave from the Atlantic is thus acc.u.mulated, and pours into the straits with much more than ordinary violence. The same thing occurs in the Bay of Fundy, where they have very high tides. But I had no idea of such violence," he added, "or I shouldn't have risked the schooner so near the rocks. Why, that inlet ran like Niagara rapids!"

"What an evidence this gives one of the strength of the moon's attraction!" said Raed. "All this great ma.s.s of water--thirty feet high--is drawn in here by the moon. What enormous force!"

"And this vast power is exerted over a distance of two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles," remarked Kit.

"I can't understand this attraction of gravitation,--how it is exerted," said Wade.

"No more can anyone," replied Raed.

"It is said that this attraction of the moon, or at least the friction of the tides on the ocean-bed which it causes, is exerted in opposition to the revolution of the earth on its axis, and that it will thus at some future time stop that motion altogether," Kit remarked. "That's what Prof. Tyndall thinks."

"Then there would be an end of day and night," said I; "or rather it would be all day on one side of the earth, and all night on the other."

"That would be unpleasant," laughed Wade; "worse than they have it up at the north pole."

"It is some consolation," said Raed, "to know that such a state of things is not likely to come in our time. According to a careful calculation, the length of the day is not thus increased more than a second in a hundred and sixty-eight thousand years."

"But how are we to go aboard, sir?" inquired Hobbs, to whom our present fix was of more interest than the long days of far-distant posterity.

The boat had been tossed about here and there, and was now some twenty or thirty yards astern of the schooner.