“These here fields are coming together, Captain Gar’ner, and our boat will soon be crushed unless we get it out of the water.”

Sure enough, a single glance behind him sufficed to assure the young master of the truth of this statement.  The field he was on was slowly swinging, bringing its western margin in closer contact with the eastern edge of the floe that lay within it.  The movement could be seen merely by the closing of the channel through which the boat had come, and by the cracking and crushing of the ice on the edges of the two fields.  So tremendous was the pressure, however, that cakes as large as a small house were broken off, and forced upward on the surface of the field, or ground into small fragments, as it might be under the vice of a power hitherto unknown to the spectators.  Slow as was the movement of the floe, it was too fast to allow of delay; and, finding a suitable place, the boat was hauled up, and put in security on the floe that lay nearest the schooner.

“This may give us a long drag to get back into the water, Stimson, and a night out of our bunks,” said Roswell, looking about him, as soon as the task was achieved.

“I do not know that, sir,” was the answer.  “It seems to me that the floe has parted alongside of them rocks, and if-so-be that should turn out to be the case, the whull on us, schooner, boat, and all hands, may drift into the bay; for that there is a current setting from this quarter up towards our island, I’m sartain of, by the feel of my oar, as we come along.”

“It may be so—­the currents run all manner of ways, and field-ice may pass the shoals, though a berg never can.  I do not remember, nevertheless, to have ever seen even a floe within the group—­nothing beyond large cakes that have got adrift by some means or other.”

“I have, sir, though only once.  A few days a’ter we got in, when I was ship-keeper, and all hands was down under the rocks of the north eend, a field come in at the northern entrance of the bay, and went out at the southern.  It might have been a league athwart it, and it drifted, as a body might say, as if it had some one aboard to give it the right sheer.  Touch it did at the south cape, but just winding as handy as a craft could have done it, in a good tide’s way, out to sea it went ag’in, bound to the south pole for-ti-’now.”

“Well, this is good news, and may be the means of saving the Vineyard craft in the end.  We do seem to be setting bodily into the bay, and if we can only get clear of that island, I do not see what is to hinder it.  Here is a famous fellow of a mountain to the northward, coming down before the wind, as one might say, and giving us a cant into the passage.  I should think that chap must produce some sort of a change, whether it be for better or worse.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” put in Thompson, who acted as a boat-steerer at need, “he may do just that, but it is all he can do.  Mr. Green and I sounded out from the cove for a league or more, a few days since, and we found less than twenty fathoms, as far as we went.  That chap up to the nor’ard there, draws something like a hundred fathoms, if he draws an inch.  He shows more above water than a first-rate’s truck.”