forces, sustained by the inspiration of life-giving and death-
dealing winds.

So that big steamer, dying by a sudden stroke, drifted, an unwieldy
corpse, away from the track of other ships. And she would have
been posted really as "overdue," or maybe as "missing," had she not
been sighted in a snowstorm, vaguely, like a strange rolling
island, by a whaler going north from her Polar cruising ground.
There was plenty of food on board, and I don't know whether the
nerves of her passengers were at all affected by anything else than
the sense of interminable boredom or the vague fear of that unusual
situation. Does a passenger ever feel the life of the ship in
which he is being carried like a sort of honoured bale of highly
sensitive goods? For a man who has never been a passenger it is
impossible to say. But I know that there is no harder trial for a
seaman than to feel a dead ship under his feet.

There is no mistaking that sensation, so dismal, so tormenting and
so subtle, so full of unhappiness and unrest. I could imagine no
worse eternal punishment for evil seamen who die unrepentant upon
the earthly sea than that their souls should be condemned to man
the ghosts of disabled ships, drifting for ever across a ghostly
and tempestuous ocean.

She must have looked ghostly enough, that broken-down steamer,
rolling in that snowstorm--a dark apparition in a world of white
snowflakes to the staring eyes of that whaler's crew. Evidently
they didn't believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port her captain
unromantically reported having sighted a disabled steamer in
latitude somewhere about 50 degrees S. and a longitude still more