The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell

When I started to relate my adventure I never designed to write an account of the journey home at large. On the contrary, I foresaw that, by the time I had arrived at this part, you would have had enough of the sea. Let me now, then, be as brief as possible.

The melting of the ice and the slowly increasing power of the sun were inexpressibly consoling to me who had had so much of the cold that I do protest if Elysium were bleak, no matter how radiant, and the abode of the fiends as hot as it is pictured, I would choose to turn my back upon the angels. I cannot say, however, that the schooner was properly thawed until we were hard upon the parallels of the Falkland Islands; she then showed her timbers naked to the sun, and exposed a brown solid deck rendered ugly by several dark patches which, scrape as we might, we could not obliterate. We struck the guns into the hold for the better ballasting of the vessel, got studding-sail booms aloft, overhauled her suits of canvas and found a great square sail which proved of inestimable importance in light winds and in running. After the ice was wholly melted out of her frame she made a little water, yet not so much but that half an hour's spell at the pump twice a day easily freed her. But, curiously enough, at the end of a fortnight she became tight again, which I attribute to the swelling of her timbers.