an old man, refused to speak at all to anybody.  Others shut themselves up in their berths to cry.  On calm days the inert steamer rolled on a leaden sea under a murky sky, or showed, in sunshine, the squalor of sea waifs, the dried white salt, the rust, the jagged broken places.  Then the gales came again.  They kept body and soul together on short rations.  Once, an English ship, scudding in a storm, tried to stand by them, heaving-to pluckily under their lee.  The seas swept her decks; the men in oilskins clinging to her rigging looked at them, and they made desperate signs over their shattered bulwarks.  Suddenly her main-topsail went, yard and all, in a terrific squall; she had to bear up under bare poles, and disappeared.

Other ships had spoken them before, but at first they had refused to be taken off, expecting the assistance of some steamer.  There were very few steamers in those latitudes then; and when they desired to leave this dead and drifting carcase, no ship came in sight.  They had drifted south out of men’s knowledge.  They failed to attract the attention of a lonely whaler, and very soon the edge of the polar ice-cap rose from the sea and closed the southern horizon like a wall.  One morning they were alarmed by finding themselves floating amongst detached pieces of ice.  But the fear of sinking passed away like their vigour, like their hopes; the shocks of the floes knocking against the ship’s side could not rouse them from their apathy:  and the Borgmester Dahl drifted out again unharmed into open water.  They hardly noticed the change.

The funnel had gone overboard in one of the heavy rolls; two of their three boats had disappeared, washed away in bad weather, and the davits swung to and fro, unsecured, with chafed rope’s ends waggling to the roll.  Nothing was done on board, and Falk told me how he had often listened to the water washing about the dark engine-room where the engines, stilled for ever, were decaying slowly into a mass of rust, as the stilled heart decays within the lifeless body.  At first, after the loss of the motive power, the tiller had been thoroughly secured by lashings.  But in course of time these had rotted, chafed, rusted, parting one by one:  and the rudder, freed, banged heavily to and fro night and day, sending dull shocks through the whole frame of the vessel.  This was dangerous.  Nobody cared enough to lift a little finger.  He told me that even now sometimes waking up at night, he fancied he could hear the dull vibrating thuds.  The pintles carried away, and it dropped off at last.

The final catastrophe came with the sending off of their one remaining boat.  It was Falk who had managed to preserve her intact, and now it was agreed that some of the hands should sail away into the track of the shipping to procure assistance.  She was provisioned with all the food they could spare for the six who were to go.  They waited for a fine day.  It was long in coming.  At last one morning they lowered her into the water.