It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down to a fragment, but still big enough to sink a ship, and floating lower than any raft, right in our way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent.  There was no time to get down on deck.  I shouted from aloft till my head was ready to split.  I was heard aft, and we managed to clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from the Southern ice-cap to have a try at our unsuspecting lives.  Had it been an hour later, nothing could have saved the ship, for no eye could have made out in the dusk that pale piece of ice swept over by the white-crested waves.

And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone: 

“But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been another case of a ‘missing’ ship.”

Nobody ever comes back from a “missing” ship to tell how hard was the death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last anguish of her men.  Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what words on their lips they died.  But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts from the extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar—­from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.

XVIII.

But if the word “missing” brings all hope to an end and settles the loss of the underwriters, the word “overdue” confirms the fears already born in many homes ashore, and opens the door of speculation in the market of risks.

Maritime risks, be it understood.  There is a class of optimists ready to reinsure an “overdue” ship at a heavy premium.  But nothing can insure the hearts on shore against the bitterness of waiting for the worst.

For if a “missing” ship has never turned up within the memory of seamen of my generation, the name of an “overdue” ship, trembling as it were on the edge of the fatal heading, has been known to appear as “arrived.”

It must blaze up, indeed, with a great brilliance the dull printer’s ink expended on the assemblage of the few letters that form the ship’s name to the anxious eyes scanning the page in fear and trembling.  It is like the message of reprieve from the sentence of sorrow suspended over many a home, even if some of the men in her have been the most homeless mortals that you may find among the wanderers of the sea.

The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction.  The underwriter, who had been trying to minimize the amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism.  The ship has been stauncher, the skies more merciful, the seas less angry, or perhaps the men on board of a finer temper than he has been willing to take for granted.