The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell

This hatch formed the entrance to the cabin, and there was no other road to it that I could see. If I wanted to use it I must first scrape away the snow; but unhappily I had left my knife in the boat, and was without any instrument that would serve me to scrape with. I thought of breaking the beer-bottle that was in my pocket and scratching with a piece of the glass; but before doing this it occurred to me to search the body on the starboard side.

I approached him as if he were alive and murderously fierce, and I own I did not like to touch him. He resembled the figure of a giant moulded in snow. In life he must have been six feet and a half tall. The snow had bloated him, and though he leaned he stood as high as I, who was of a tolerable stature. The snow was on his beard and mustaches and on his hair; but these features were merged and compacted into the snow on his coat, and as his cap came low and was covered with snow too, he, with the little fragment of countenance that remained, the flesh whereof had the colour and toughness of the skin of a drum that has been well beaten, submitted as terrible an object as mortal sight ever rested on. I say I did not like to touch him, and one reason was I feared he would tumble; and though I know not why I should have dreaded this, yet the apprehension of it so worked in me that for some time it held me idly staring at him.