The Arctic Whaleman; or, Winter in the Arctic Ocean

by Lewis Holmes

ICEBERGS.

Some of the most remarkable phenomena seen in the Northern Ocean, and the manner of their formation, are icebergs. They are greatly feared by seamen, and a contact with them would be equivalent to striking a rock. They are formed far up in the polar region during the intense and protracted cold of winter; and in the change of the season in summer, though ice is always accumulating in high latitudes, they drift with the currents into lower latitudes, where they melt, and finally disappear. They are of varied dimensions, indicating by these facts somewhat the sources whence they come, and wearing every conceivable exterior form.

They are formed by the falling of snow over steep and high cliffs on the borders of the sea; "little by little the incrustations on the shore and cliffs increase to the size of mountains, and then, being torn away from their fastenings, either by the winds, or by their own weight, or by the action of the sea beating against their bases or undermining them, are swept into the ocean, where they continue to accumulate by the falling of snow and frozen water, and finally resemble great islands."

Large masses of ice, which take the form of bergs, are formed along the rocky-bound coast of the Arctic.

On the fall of the tide, after the ocean has been frozen over, the localities of the rocks and ledges are clearly observable. When the tide rises, the superincumbent mass is lifted up, and a new layer is formed underneath. This process goes on with the rise and fall of the tides and the accumulation of ice, until vast ridges, broken and dislocated, assuming every variety of appearance, are thus pressed up to a great height.

We observed the gradual rise of one of these immense piles of ice not far from our winter quarters. It appeared to be more than twenty-five feet above the ordinary ice around it.

The cliffs upon whose sides we have seen icebergs form rise to the enormous height of two to four hundred feet. And the shore was so bold, and the depth of water so great at their bases, that a ship would probably strike her yards against their precipitous sides before she would ground. A vessel, therefore, being dashed against those adamantine walls in a gale of wind, would instantly fly to pieces, and not a seaman would be saved.

"The distance to which icebergs float from the polar regions on the opposite sides of the line is, as may be supposed, very different. Their extreme limit in the northern hemisphere is judged to be about lat. 40°, though they are occasionally seen in lat. 42° N., near the termination of the great bank of Newfoundland, and at the Azores, lat. 42° N., to which they have sometimes drifted from Baffin's Bay.

"But in the other hemisphere, they have been seen, within the last few years, at different points off the Cape of Good Hope, between lat. 36° and 39°. One of these was two miles in circumference and one hundred and fifty feet high, appearing like chalk when the sun was obscured, and having the lustre of refined sugar when the sun was shining upon it. Others rose from two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet above the level of the water, and were therefore of great volume below; since it is ascertained by experiments on the buoyancy of ice floating in sea water, that for every cubic foot seen above, there must at least be eight cubic feet below water."

Captain Sir John Ross saw several icebergs in Baffin's Bay aground in water fifteen hundred feet deep! Many of them are driven down into Hudson's Bay, and, accumulating there, diffuse excessive cold over the entire continent; so that Captain Franklin reports that, at the mouth of Haye's River, which lies in the same latitude as the north of Prussia or the south of Scotland, ice is found every where, in digging wells, in summer, at the depth of four feet. "It is a well-known fact that, every four or five years, a large number of icebergs floating from Greenland double Cape Langaness, and are stranded on the west coast of Iceland. The inhabitants are then aware that their crops of hay will fail in consequence of fogs, which are generated almost incessantly; and the dearth of food is not confined to the land, for the temperature of the water is so changed that the fish entirely desert the coast."

As to the relative thickness of common field ice where it remained unbroken through the winter, we found it varied from ten to twenty-five feet in thickness. We had an opportunity of judging, from the fact that we examined several openings which the natives had made in the ice off East Cape for the purpose of taking seal.

The sudden disappearance of large and extended tracts of ice in the northern seas, in addition to its being carried away by the force of currents towards the south, is attributed by many to its sinking. How ice should sink, when its specific gravity is lighter than water, is a question for the speculative to discuss—unless there be some other preponderating element mingled with it, such as fragments of rock, sand, or gravel.

Whalemen have frequently affirmed that they have not only been surrounded by fields or large tracts of ice at night, but in the morning it had wholly disappeared from the surface of the water. Therefore many have arrived at the conclusion, that in certain states of the ice, in the process of breaking up and thawing, it actually sinks below the surface of the water, if not to the bottom.

There was another phenomenon which we observed. During the coldest season of the year, and in certain states of the atmosphere, the air deposits its moisture in the form of frozen fog. It has the appearance of a fine gossamer netting or icicles, and these are dispersed through the atmosphere, and so extremely minute that they seem to pierce and excoriate the skin; and, especially when the wind blew, it was impossible to face this storm of icy vapor. We have seen a deposition of this frost from four to six inches during the space of twelve hours.