It was Captain Barrington who uttered these words after a brief
examination.

"Do you think we will be able to get off?" Frank asked Ben Stubbs, who
with the boys and the rest of the crew was in the bow peering down at
what appeared to be rocks beneath the vessel's bow, except that their
glitter in the lanterns that were hung over the side showed that the
ship was aground on solid ice.

"Hard to say," pronounced Ben. "These polar reefs are bad things. They
float along a little below the surface and many a ship that has struck
them has had her bottom ripped off before you could say 'knife.'"

"Are we seriously damaged?" asked Billy, anxiously gazing at the
scared faces around him.

"I hope not," said the old salt; "there is one thing in our favor and
that is that we were being towed so that our bow was raised quite a
bit, and instead of hitting the ice fair and square we glided up on
top of it."

Another point in favor of the ship's getting off was that there had
been no time to reshift the cargo, which, it will be recalled, had
been stowed astern when her bow was sprung off Patagonia, so that she
rode "high by the head," as sailors say. So far as they could see in
the darkness about twenty feet of her bow had driven up onto the polar
reef. The Brutus had stopped towing in response to the signal gun of
the Southern Cross in time to prevent the towing-bitts being rooted
out bodily or the cable parting.