“We don’t allow stowaways on this ship,” he said. “Paying passengers only!”
“But I’m not a stowaway,” Fergus pleaded. “I’m a rescue!”
“I say who’s what around here,” the captain growled, “and all I know is you haven’t paid for a ticket.”
“I’ll work for my passage!” Fergus pleaded. “Please don’t throw me back!”
“Work!” the captain said, laughing. “You’ve got arms like noodles and little chicken legs. What work could you possibly do?”
Though Fergus knew his facility with tides and currents could be of great help to a ship captain, he had learned his lesson back in Skelligeen, and kept his mouth shut about it. Instead he said, “I can work harder than any man here, and you’ll never hear me complain, no matter what you make me do!”
“Is that so?” said the captain. “We’ll see about that. Someone fetch the boy a scrub brush!”
The captain turned Fergus into his personal slave. Every day Fergus was forced to clean the captain’s quarters, iron his clothes, shine his shoes, and bring him his meals, and when he was done with those things, he scrubbed the decks and emptied latrine buckets, which were heavy and sloshed onto his feet as he dumped them overboard. Fergus did more work than anyone else on the ship, but, true to his word, he never complained.
The work didn’t bother him, but the problem of the ship’s food supply did. The captain had taken on too many passengers and not enough provisions, and though Captain Shaw and his crew ate like kings, Fergus and the passengers were forced to subsist on crusts of stale bread and cups of broth that contained more mouse droppings than meat. Even those nearly inedible rations were in short supply; however fast the Hannah sailed, there was hardly enough to last the voyage.
The weather grew unseasonably cold. One morning it began to snow, even though it was late spring. One of the passengers pointed out that the sun was not where it should be for a voyage headed west, toward America; instead, they seemed to be sailing north.
A group of passengers confronted the captain. “Where are we?” they said. “Is this really the way to America?”
“It’s a shortcut,” the captain assured them. “We’ll be there in no time.”
That afternoon Fergus saw icebergs floating in the distance. He was beginning to suspect they’d been duped, so that evening he listened outside the captain’s door while pretending to scrub the hallway.
“Just another day or two and we should reach Pelt Island,” he heard the captain say to his first mate. “We’ll pick up a cargo of furs, deliver it to New York, and that alone should double our profits for the voyage!”
Fergus was furious. They weren’t taking a shortcut to America at all! They were purposely veering off course, making the journey longer and almost guaranteeing the passengers would starve before they reached port!
Before Fergus could slip away, the captain’s door flew open. He was caught.
“He’s been spying!” the captain cried. “What did you hear?”
“Every last word!” Fergus said. “And when I tell the passengers what you’ve done, they’re going to throw you overboard!”
The captain and first mate drew their cutlasses. But just as they were closing in on him, there was a terrible crash and what felt like an earthquake, and they were all thrown to the floor.
The captain and the first mate picked themselves up and rushed from the room, Fergus and his threat forgotten. The Hannah had struck an iceberg, and it was sinking fast. There was only one lifeboat, and before the passengers knew what was happening, Captain Shaw and his cowardly men had commandeered it for themselves. Desperate mothers cried out for the captain to take their children aboard, but, pistols in hand, his men threatened anyone who came near their lifeboat. And then the captain and his men were gone, and there were no more lifeboats, and Fergus and the passengers were alone on a sinking ship in the middle of an icy sea.24
The moon was high and bright, and in its light Fergus could see the iceberg they had hit. It wasn’t far away, and it looked wide and flat enough to stand on. The ship was listing badly to one side but hadn’t yet sunk, so Fergus summoned a current and pushed the broken Hannah until its side bumped against the iceberg’s edge. The passengers helped one another onto the ice, the last of them leaving the ship just before it sank beneath the waves. They cheered and rejoiced, but their voices were drowned out as a wintry wind began to howl. It seemed they had traded a quick death by drowning for a protracted one by cold and starvation. They spent the night shivering on the ice, huddled together for a little warmth.
In the morning they woke to find a polar bear lurking close by. It was thin and wretched-looking. The people and the bear watched one another nervously, and then, after a few hours, the bear stood up and walked to the edge of the iceberg. He seemed to have heard something, and when Fergus followed him at a careful distance, he saw a big school of fish churning the water a few hundred yards away. There were thousands of them—more than enough to feed everyone, if only they could be reached!
The bear flopped into the water and swam out toward the fish. He was too weak to reach it, though, and soon clambered back onto the iceberg, miserable and exhausted.
Fergus knew what he had to do, even if it meant breaking the promise he’d made to his mother yet again. He raised his arms, clenched his fists, and made a current that directed the fish right toward their iceberg. Soon, fish by the hundreds were banging against it and flopping up onto the ice. The bear roared with excitement, vacuumed several into his mouth, then scooped up a pawload and ran off.