'What did you find?' asked Roxanna.
'The body of the captain.'
'It's all so terrible.'
'I imagine there is worse to see.'
The words were prophetic. They divided up and went from cabin to cabin. The more exquisite passengers' accommodations were in the roundhouse, an expansive space with quarter galleries and windows partitioned into various-sized cabins in the stern below the poop deck. Passengers booked empty space. They had to furnish their cabin themselves, providing couches, beds, and chairs, all lashed down in anticipation of heavy weather. Wealthy passengers often brought such personal possessions as bureaus, bookshelves, and musical instruments, including pianos and harps. Here the searchers found nearly thirty bodies in various positions of death. Some died sitting upright, some lay in bed, while others were sprawled on the deck. All looked as if they had peacefully dozed off.
Roxanna was unsettled by those whose eyes were open. The color of their irises seemed enhanced by the pure white faces surrounding them. She cringed when one of the Paloverde's crewmen reached out and touched the hair of one of the ladies. The frozen hair made a strange crackling noise and broke off in the crewman's hand.
The great cabin on the deck below the more elegant roundhouse staterooms looked like a morgue after a disaster. Mender saw any number of dead, mostly men, many of them British military officers in uniform. Forward was the steerage cabin, which was also filled with frozen corpses in hammocks slung over ship's supplies and luggage in the steerage compartment.
Everyone aboard the Madras had died peacefully. There was no sign of chaos. Nothing was in disarray. All articles and goods were stowed neatly. But for the final narrative by Captain Hunt, it seemed that time had stopped and they had all peacefully died as they lived. What Roxanna and Mender saw was not grotesque or terrifying but simply an overwhelming misfortune. These people had been dead for seventy-nine years and been forgotten by the passing world. Even those who had wondered about and mourned their disappearance were long since gone.
'I don't understand,' said Roxanna. 'How did they all die?'
'Those who didn't starve, froze,' answered her husband.
'But they could have fished through the ice and shot penguin the same as we did, and burned parts of the ship to stay warm.'
'The captain's last words say his ship was driven far off their course to the south. My guess is they were trapped in the ice much farther from shore than we were, and the captain, believing they would eventually drift free, followed the rules of good seamanship and forbid fires on board his ship for fear of an accidental conflagration, until it was too late.'
'So, one by one, they died.'
'Then, when spring came and the ice melted, instead of being carried by the current out into the South Pacific as a derelict, contrary winds drove the ship ashore, where it has lain since the last century.'
'I think you're right, Captain,' said first mate Bigelow, approaching from the forward part of the ship. 'Judging from the clothing on the bodies, the poor devils did not expect a voyage that would take them into frigid waters. Most all appear better dressed for a tropical climate. They must have been sailing from India to England.'
'A great tragedy,' Roxanna sighed, 'that nothing could have saved these unfortunate people.'
'Only God,' muttered Mender, 'only God.' He turned to Bigelow. 'What cargo was she carrying?'
'No gold or silver that I could find, but a general cargo of tea, Chinese porcelain in tightly packed wooden crates, and bales of silk, along with a variety of rattan, spices, and camphor. And, oh yes, I found a small storeroom, locked with heavy chains, directly below the captain's cabin.'
'Did you search it?' asked Mender.
Bigelow shook his head. 'No, sir. I thought it only proper that you should be present. I left my men to work at breaking the chains.'
'Maybe the room contains treasure,' said Roxanna, a tinge of red returning to her cheeks.
'We'll soon find out.' Mender nodded at Bigelow. 'Mr. Bigelow, will you lead the way?'
The first mate led them down a ladder into the aft main steerage hold. The storeroom stood opposite an eighteen-pound cannon whose port was frozen shut. Two of the Paloverde's crew were attacking the heavy padlock securing the chains that were bolted into the door. Using a sledgehammer and chisel found in the carpenters' workshop, they furiously hammered away at the lock's shackle until it snapped apart. Then they twisted the heavy door latch until it sprang free and the door could be pushed inward.
The interior was dimly lit by a small port in the bulwarks. Wooden crates were stacked from bulkhead to bulkhead, but the contents appeared to have been packed haphazardly. Mender stepped over to a large crate and easily lifted one end of the lid.
'These chests were not carefully packed and loaded aboard in port by commercial traders,' he said quietly. 'It looks to me like they were sloppily crated by the crew sometime during the voyage and placed under lock and key by the captain.'
'Don't just stand there, husband,' ordered Roxanna, mesmerized by curiosity. 'Open them.'
While the crew stood outside the storage room, Mender and Bigelow began prying open the wooden chests. No one seemed to notice the bitter cold. They were spellbound in anticipation of finding some great treasure in gold and gemstones. But when Mender held up one of the pieces of the contents from a chest, their hopes were quickly shattered.
'A copper urn,' he said, passing it to Roxanna, who held it up in the brighter light of the steerage compartment. 'Beautifully sculpted. Greek or Roman, if I'm any judge of antiquity.'
Bigelow removed and passed several more artifacts through the open door. Most of them were small copper sculptures of strange-looking animals with black opal eyes. 'They're beautiful,' whispered Roxanna, admiring the designs that had been sculpted and etched into the copper. 'They're nothing like anything I've seen in books.'
'They do look unusual,' agreed Mender.
'Are they of any value?' asked Bigelow.
'To a collector of antiquities or a museum maybe,' answered Mender. 'But I seriously doubt any of us could get rich off them…' He paused as he held up a life-size human skull that gleamed black in the veiled light. 'Good Lord, will you look at this?'
'It's frightening,' muttered Bigelow.
'Looks like it was carved by Satan himself,' murmured a crewman in awe.
Totally unintimidated, Roxanna held it up and stared into the empty eye sockets. 'It has the appearance of ebony glass. And see the dragon coming out between its teeth.'
'My guess, it's obsidian,' observed Mender, 'but I couldn't begin to presume how it was carved-' Mender was interrupted by a loud crackling sound, as the ice around the stern of the ship heaved and grumbled.
One of the crew dropped down the stairway from the upper deck, shouting, his voice high-pitched and harsh. 'Captain, we must leave quickly! A great crack is spreading across the ice and pools of water are forming! I fear if we don't hurry, we'll be trapped here!'
Mender wasted no time in questions. 'Get back to the ship!' he ordered. 'Quickly!'
Roxanna wrapped the skull in her scarf and tucked it under one arm.
'No time for souvenirs,' Mender snapped at her. But she ignored him and refused to let go of the skull.
Pushing Roxanna ahead of them, the men hurried up the stairway to the main deck and dropped down onto the ice. They were horrified to see that what had been a solid field of ice was now buckling and breaking up into ponds. Cracks turned into meandering streams and rivers as the seawater poured up through the ice onto the floe. None of them had any idea the floe could melt so fast.
Skirting the upheaved masses, some of them forty feet high, and leaping across the cracks before they widened and made crossing impossible, the crew and Roxanna ran as if all the banshees of hell were after them. The macabre, indescribable sounds of the ice grinding against itself struck terror in their minds. The going was exhausting. At every step their feet sank six inches into the blanket of snow that had accumulated on the level stretches of the floe.
