Read "The Frozen Pirate" by W. Clark Russell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I lighted a pipe and sat pondering his story a little while. There was no doubt he had given me the exact truth so far as his relation of it went. As it was certain then that the _Boca del Dragon_ (as she was called) had been fixed in the ice for hard upon fifty years, the conclusion I formed was that she had been blown by some hundreds of leagues further south than the point to which the _Laughing Mary_ had been driven; that this ice in which she was entangled was not then drifting northwards, but was in the grasp of some polar current that trended it south-easterly; that in due course it was carried to the Antarctic main of ice, where it lay compacted; after which, through stress of weather or by the agency of a particular temperature, a great mass of it broke away and started on that northward course which bergs of all magnitude take when they are ruptured from the frozen continent.
This theory may be disputed, but it matters not. My business is to relate what befell me; if I do my share honestly the candid reader will not, I believe, quarrel with me for not being able to explain everything as I go along.