With the promptitude of seamen the crew collected a lot of stuff for making a smoke; they stacked a large heap of material near the gangway and set fire to it, and in about ten minutes a thick body of blue smoke was rolling over the rail, and clouding upwards with many a sparkling ruddy gleam shooting up tongue-shaped or arrow-like into the throat of the sooty pouring. It was wide daylight and the antarctic day young, but the clouds rimmed the horizon with the shadow of night, and the crimson light of the flare promised as swift an intelligence of our forlorn condition as the smoke. The seamen continued to feed the fire; and all the while Captain Burke was stretching his telescope at the distant gleam; the men again and again turning their eyes from it to him with looks growing dark with impatience and consuming anxiety. Mr. Owen had fetched his binocular glass and strained his eyes through them without intermission. Mrs. Burke and I standing in the companion, which was the one sheltered part of that long stretch of frozen deck and smashed bulwarks, gazed without speech. Suddenly a sailor, one who had been most active in feeding the fire, sprang on to the rail: he grasped a spear-shaped projection of ice, which broke short off and he fell on his back; he sprang again with an oath, and after looking, turned to others who were standing near the fire and roared: 'Mates, she's leaving us, by God!' 'She takes us for a whaler trying out. There's no good in smoke as a signal down here,' said a sailor. 'It's our chance,' bawled the fellow who had sprung and fallen, now throwing himself back on to the deck. 'There mayn't come another for weeks. What's to happen then? Are we to drive about in this fired ocean till we ends as froze-up corpses? I'm for following her.' 'Take her bearings, bo'sun, while she's in sight,' shouted a seaman, and the huge sailor, as obedient as though the captain had given the command, rolled aft and put the sharp of his hand upon the compass bowl. 'Captain Burke,' exclaimed one of the seamen, in a voice startling with its sudden savage note of revolt, 'we've had enough of this. There's nothen that's a-going to be of any use to us in them booms.' He pointed behind him with his thumb. 'There's our chance. We'll run ourselves into her sight and she'll pick us up.' 'Hold your jaw, you Johnson!' said Captain Burke, who was as white as the deck in the face, though his eyes showed dangerously, like a madman's who watches his chance to leap upon you.