‘How the deuce can you make that out?’ asked one of the first speakers. ‘Ain’t the Colonies honestly at war with the English? and have we been cruising against any other nation but them? To be sure, we rummaged that bit of a prison there at Havana, you know, but we didn’t do any harm. A prison’s a prison, and a ship’s a ship; it can’t be piracy to storm a prison-house, dy’e see.’ ‘True, brother, but didn’t our Captain ship in the brig Constance as second?’ asked the other speaker; ‘and ain’t he captain of her now by his own making, and ain’t the brig his? Can you tell what all this signifies? It looks to me like what a court-martial would call piracy, that’s all.’ ‘Perhaps so; but we ain’t going for to be taken, you see,’ said a new speaker, ‘and that makes all the difference in the world’ This remark was received with a hearty laugh by all and the conversation took another turn. ‘Let’s drop this subject, messmates; it’s no use talking about it,’ said another. ‘Come, whose turn is it to spin a yarn?’ ‘Aye, whose turn is it?’ asked several voices at the same time. ‘Come, Brace,’ said one or two of the men, ‘it’s yours, so just come to an anchor alongside here on this chest, and pay out.’ ‘Ay, ay, my hearties. Avast there, Terrence Moony with your blarney, while I spin a yarn, do you hear, boy?’ ‘Ay, ay, brother, go ahead,’ said Terrence, good naturedly. Bolling a monstrous quid of tobacco about his mouth for a few minutes, he who was to speak, at length settled it quietly in one side of his cheek, plugging it well down with his tongue, then lounging into an easy attitude, he began: ‘It may be that there is some of you as have sailed up there to the Northerd, where it is so cold that a man don’t dare to stand still for a moment for fear that he shall be frozen to death. No? Well, I have then, and it’s about one of them cruises that I’m going to tell you. You see, we were up there knocking about for some good reason, but for what I don’t know, as our captain sailed with sealed orders, and a foremast man is not very often enlightened by a look at the log of the captain’s mind. ‘But the king had ordered the ship to go there, and I was a pressed man on board so I was there too. And there we were three hundred as fine fellows as you ever set eyes on, or as ever ran up a rattlin, freezing our fingers and toes every watch, and half the time the ship was shut in entirely by the ice; and in this way we remained seven or eight days, I remember, fitted into the ice as close as our carpenter could lay in a plank, nothing to be seen for miles in any direction but one long and almost endless field of ice, with once in a while a walrus, or a sea-horse out of the water and laying sleeping by the small crevices that were formed here and here in the neighborhood of the ship.