I did not further continue my search of the vessel that night, but went on board the Falcon, feeling sick and nervous.  I could eat nothing; but having taken a drink of hot coffee, I sat before a good fire, thinking over what I had just seen, and planning what I should do.

If any one of those poor men could, in his dire need, have had a drink of my coffee, or a spoonful of the good porridge I had made but could not myself eat, heavens! how he would have relished it!  Here was I, with a schooner well loaded with provisions.  Some strange fate had brought me to this ship.  But all that I could have supplied was useless to the sufferers now.  They had perished of starvation and cold, and my food and fire were of no avail, for I had come thirteen years too late!

Chapter XXXII.  The Last Of The “Pilgrim.”

I could sleep but little during that long and wearying night.  Terrible thoughts haunted me—­thoughts of my own peril and loneliness, thoughts of the dead men that I had seen.  Before daybreak I was on deck, and in the dim light I noticed that the ice which had been so scattered over the sea for the past few days had almost disappeared.

At daylight, looking overboard at the hull of the dread ship alongside, I observed two things.  The first was that we were drifting perceptibly southward; this was satisfactory.  The second was that the larger vessel had sunk at least a couple of inches deeper in the water; this was alarming.

Now that it was daylight I was able to read the ship’s name at her stern, though I had first to knock away a quantity of ice and snow from above the letters.  I found that she was the Pilgrim of Bristol.  I had before perceived that she was not a whaler, nor did she appear to have been fitted out for an Arctic voyage.  I marvelled much what had brought her to these seas, and whither she had been bound, and what her cargo was.

More than all did I wonder what I was to do with her.  Here was I, placed by strange circumstances in command of two vessels, a schooner and a barque, and without the power or skill to take either of them into port—­not knowing, indeed, where a port could be found.  Had Davie Flett, Peter, and Jerry still been with me on the Falcon, we might have taken the Pilgrim to Stromness; we might also have given to her crew, or what remained of them, the decent burial for which they had waited so long.  But, as things stood, I should have been thankful if I could have simply foreseen the possibility of getting out of my position of difficulty, regardless of either vessel.  The sight of those dead bodies on the Pilgrim had made me utterly downcast.  Their terrible fate had suggested to me the uncertainty of my own.

When I had taken some breakfast, I again went aboard the Pilgrim.  I discovered that her cargo consisted for the most part of sulphur.  Now, sulphur I knew to be a product of Iceland, and I judged from this that the ship had touched at that northern island.