Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 2.djvu/67

48 pieces intervening between us and the outer bay. But what especially causes me to remember this day was the sudden disappearance of the wrecked Rescue. On looking toward Cooper's Island, where her hull had remained for so many months, we were surprised to find it gone. The waters had floated it away, and, for a moment, we fancied nothing more of the famous schooner would again be seen, unless away toward or on the great sea. But shortly afterward, on visiting Whale Island, close by, we saw that the Rescue had drifted off with the tide, and had got into the narrow channel of open water that then surrounded the island. "The Rescue" says my journal, "seems yet to live; she has navigated herself completely around Cooper's Island since early this morning. She sweeps around slowly and—I was about to say—prettily." The Rescue was doomed to wander about "like a ghost"—as some of the men said—for days. By the alternate ebb and flow of the tide, she was carried seaward, to be brought back to her old place, then to be carried out again. Then back again she came, dancing from place to place, like the ever-changing ice-sconces surrounding her. She made the circuit of another island south-east of Cooper's, and again came near to us; and so in and out, dancing here and moving there, the poor Rescue played about us, until at length her very presence seemed to cause a superstitious dread. This was especially so when another day, and yet another, passed on, and still our vessel could not be moved away. As an illustration of this superstitious feeling among the seamen, it may be mentioned that the want of success attending the George Henry in whaling was attributed to the circumstance of bringing the Rescue with them as a tender. Some said she had never been anything but a drawback since first built, and that she had nearly caused the loss of numbers of lives; now she seemed to hang about them as an omen of ill luck—as a ghost! At 8 of the 27th of July the breeze freshened up