30 HORRORS OF AN ARCTIC WINTER. The poet Thomson, in his "Seasons," has drawn a graphic picture of the accumulated horrors of an Arctic winter: "Ill fares the bark, with trembling wretches charged, Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, While night o'erwhelms the sea, and horror looks The assembled mischiefs that besiege them round? The roar of wind and waves, the crush of ice, CHAPTER III. ICEBERGS. "These are The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls BYRON. MONG the most imposing and grand of the many wonders of the ocean world, are the fixed and floating icebergs, the "palaces of nature," which assume extraordinary and fantastic shapes, and more than realize the most sublime conceptions of the imagination. "Well, indeed," observes Snow in his "Journal of the Arctic Seas," "may the mind become awe-struck and the heart almost cease to beat as the lips exclaim, 'Wonderful Thou art in all Thy works! Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy glory!' on beholding these mighty and surpassing works of the great Creator. East and west, and north and south, the Arctic regions present a picture of grandeur and magnificence nowhere to be equalled-great beyond conception-impossible to be truly pourtrayed." These icebergs are described by Arctic navigators as mimicking every style of architecture on earth; cathedrals with pillars, arches, portals and towering pinnacles, overhanging cliffs, the ruins of a marble city, palaces, pyramids, and obelisks; castles with towers, 32 CHANGING TINTS Of iceberGS. walls, bastions, fortifications, and bridges; a fleet of colossal menof-war under full sail; trees, animals, and human beings: one is described as an enormous balloon lying on its side in a collapsed state. A number of icebergs seen at the distance of a few miles presented the appearance of a mountainous country, deceiving the eyes of experienced mariners. These icebergs differ somewhat in colour according to age, solidity, or the atmosphere. A very general appearance is that of cliffs of chalk, or of white-grey marble. A few have a bluish or emerald-green tint. The sun's rays, reflected from them, give a glistening appearance to their surface, like that of silver. In the night they are readily distinguished in the distance by their natural effulgence, and, in foggy weather, by a peculiar blackness of the atmosphere. The Rev. Mr. Noble thus describes the strange and sudden transformations and the changing tints of icebergs. "One resembled, at first, a cluster of Chinese buildings, then a Gothic cathedral of the early style. It was curious to see how all that mimicry of a grand religious pile was soon to change to another like the Coliseum, its vast interior now a delicate blue, and then a greenish white. It was only necessary to run on half a mile to find this icy theatre split asunder. An age of ruin seemed to have passed over it, leaving only to the view inner cliffs, one a glistening white, and the other blue, soft and airy as the July heavens." Another berg shone like polished silver, dripping with dews, the water streaming down in all directions in little rills and falls, glistening in the light like molten glass. Veins of gem-like transparency, blue as sapphire, crossed the mass. "Solomon in all his glory," observes Dr. Hayes, in his "Open Polar Sea," "was not clothed like the flowers of the field. Would you behold an iceberg apparelled with a glory that eclipses all floral beauty, and makes you think not only of the clouds of heaven at sunrise and sunset, but of heaven itself, you must come to it at sunrise and sunset. Lofty ridges of the shape of flames have the tint of flames; out of the purity of the lily bloom the pink and the rose. I will not say cloth of gold drapes, but water ORIGIN OF ICEBERGS. 33 of gold washes-water of green, orange, scarlet, crimson and purple wash-the crags and steeps; strange metallic tints gleam in the shaggy caverns, copper, bronze and gold: endless grace of form and outline." These icebergs-so beautiful in summer, so grand and awful under a wintry aspect-project above the surface of the sea like high hills composed of rugged and steep rock. Navigators have frequently stated that they have seen them rising from four to five hundred feet above the water, and extending more than a mile in length. During the first voyage of Captain John Ross, Lieutenant Parry measured an iceberg, which was aground in Baffin's Bay, in sixty-one fathoms of water. It was 4,169 yards long, 3,689 broad, and fifty-one feet elevated above the sea. Its weight was calculated to be equal to 1,292,397,673 tons! Captain Graah, a Danish navigator, examined an iceberg on the eastern coast of Greenland, and estimated its circuit, at its base, at four thousand feet. In height it was one hundred and twenty feet above the sea-level. He calculated that its contents amounted to upwards of nine millions of cubic feet. Dr. Hayes estimated the cubical contents of one at about twenty-seven millions of feet. You doubtless wish to know the origin of these stupendous floating bergs, whence they come, how they are formed, and their ultimate destination. It has been ascertained, beyond all doubt, that they originate in the land, being nothing more than fragments of glaciers-a name given to immense masses of ice, or appendages to snow mountains. By far the larger number of these are formed on the coasts of Greenland. The mountains are always covered with snow; the valleys between them are filled with ice, derived from the higher portions of the mountains, and are thus converted into enormous glaciers. If the extent of all the shores of Greenland, in which the glaciers advance to the very sea, were put together, it is probable they would constitute a coast-line exceeding six hundred miles in length. These are the birth-places of the icebergs. The average height or depth of the ice at its free edge, or seaward in these valleys, is about twelve or fifteen hundred feet. As the glaciers advance farther into the sea, the rise and fall of the 34 TERRORS OF NAVIGATORS AMONG ICEBERGS. tide undermine the base, and enormous masses become detached and fall into the sea with a crash like thunder. The icebergs thus formed-vast moving mountains or islands—are drifted along, some finding their way to the Northern Atlantic-a distance of more than two thousand two hundred miles from the place of their departure-brought down by a powerful current which appears to originate under the immense masses of ice which surround the Arctic Pole. "Winter's flotilla by their captain led (Who boasts with them to make his prowess known, And to the ear renews those notes of doom That brought portentous warnings through the gloom; Fearfully appalling are the dangers arising from these icebergs on their floating voyages, and we cannot wonder at the terror excited by their appearance among the early navigators among these ice-bound seas. In the expedition of Captain James Hall, under Danish auspices, for exploring Greenland, in 1605, we learn that the sailors were in sight of the south point of that country, and, to avoid the ice which encompassed the shore, they stood to the westward, and fell in with "mighty islands of ice, being-very high, like huge mountains of ice, making a hideous and wonderful noise," and on one of them was observed "a huge rockstone of the weight of three hundred pounds or thereabouts." Finding nothing but ice and fog from the 1st to the 10th of June, the "Lion's" people hailed the admiral, "calling very fearfully, and desiring the pilot to alter his course, and return homeward." The alarm spread to the admiral's ship, and they had determined to put about had not Cunningham (the captain) protested he would stand by the admiral "as long as his bloode was warme, for the good of the Kinge's majestie." This pacified the seamen for a |