"By midday our new hand was so far recovered as to be able to tell us that he was by name Urbain Gautier, a French Canadian, and that he had been a seaman on board the Russian whaler; that he had resented some ill-usage, been flogged, and thrown overboard. In proof of this summary procedure he showed us his back, which was covered with livid marks, evidently produced by the hearty application of a cat or knotted rope’s end, but Scotch Willy lessened the general sympathy by informing me and Tom Dacres, in a whisper, that when the Canadian’s knife fell from its sheath as we dragged him on board there was blood on its blade. "Blood! "This circumstance was whispered among the crew from ear to ear, and gave rise to many suspicions in no way favourable to our new acquisition, whom, however, they cared not to question, as he was a man singularly repulsive and brutal in aspect, and having a something in his expression of eye which made all on board shrink from him. "Urbain Gautier was Herculean in stature and proportion, and most saturnine and satanic in visage. His eyes were too near each other, and too deeply set on each side of his long hooked nose, over which his two eye-brows met in a straight and black unbroken line. His mouth, with its thin lips and serrated fangs, suggested cruelty, and altogether there was a general and terrible aspect of evil about him. He spoke English, but when excited resorted to Canadian-French oaths and interjections. "If ’twas he brought us ill-luck we got our first instalment of it that very night. "The morning broke cold, grey, and cheerless, amid a storm of snow and wind, through which, to reduce the ship’s speed, for we could see but little ahead, we drove under our fore-course and topsails all close-reefed now, and bitterly did we all regret the impatience which made us leave our snug moorings in Harbour Grace. "Now and then the black scud would lift a little, but only to show the ice-fields drawing nearer and nearer, so, lest we should be crushed or enclosed amid them hopelessly, and then, it might be, starved to death when the last of our beef, biscuits, and water were gone, we steered in for the land, with the wild Arctic tempest—for such it was—increasing every moment. "We tried sounding to leeward, but the lead always slipped from my benumbed hands, and in the end we lost the frozen line, as it parted in the iron block which was seized to the rigging by a tail-rope. Ere long we struck soundings with the hand lead, for the water was beginning to shoal! "The brig’s tops and the bellies of the close-reefed topsails became filled with snow, and now we began to look gloomily at each other, fearing rather than doubting the end.