After Icebergs with a Painter / A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland.

by Louis Legrand Noble

CHAPTER XLVI.

AFTER OUR LAST ICEBERG.—THE ISLES.—TWILIGHT BEAUTIES OF ICEBERGS.—MIDNIGHT ILLUMINATION.

Friday, July 15. This is another of the summer days of Labrador, with a soft, southerly wind, tempting one to ramble in spite of musquitoes and black flies, which, though few, are uncommonly pestilent. The painter is sleeping from very weariness, and I am loitering about these cliffs, note-book in hand, in a drowsy state, for a similar reason. These long days and late hours about headlands and icebergs are attended with their pains as well as pleasures. From the tenor of my pages one would think that all was joyous and interesting. Let him reflect, that for his sake I record the joyous and the interesting, and pass by the dull and the vexatious. I flit from frowning cliff to cliff where the surf thunders and Leviathan spends his holiday among the capelin, and linger in the sunshine and shadow of an iceberg, the choicest among fifty, but give you but a suspicion of the common things between. The sparkling points of the life of this novel voyage are for the reader’s eye; the chill and the weariness, and the sea-sickness, and the mass of things, lumpish and brown in “the light of common day,” are for that tomb of the Capulets away back in the fields of one’s own memory. But to return: this kind of life begins to wear upon us, to wear upon the nerves, and suggests the importance of keeping dull and still awhile.

I find myself looking towards home, looking that way over the sea from the hill-tops, and rather dreading the rough and tumble and chances of the journey. I regret that time will not permit a continuation of the voyage, at least as far as Sandwich Bay, where the mountains are now covered with snow. We shall visit, this afternoon and evening, our last iceberg, and mainly for some experiments with lights. The rocks here, among which I saunter, are a kind of gallery tufted with wild grass and herbage, up to which a few goats climb from the dwellings near our vessel, and upon a patch of which I lounge and scribble. If there were any spirit in me, the fine prospect, although somewhat familiar, would awaken some fresh thoughts and feelings. One thought comes swelling up from the sluggish depths—it is this: There is a fascination in these northern seas, with their ices and their horrid shores. The arctic voyagers feel and act under its impulse. I can understand their readiness to return to polar scenes.

Late in the afternoon, sailing up the bay, after an ugly iceberg of no particular shape or remarkable attraction. In New York Bay, it would be thought a most splendid thing, and so indeed it would be; but here, in contrast with the great berg of Belle Isle water, and many others, it is a small matter, a harmless and dull specimen of its kind. Its merit is its convenience. And yet, let me tell you, we pause in our approach at a distance of seventy yards. I am not willing to go any nearer upon this, the cliff side. The agent, Mr. Bendle, told us this morning, that when he first came from England to these shores, he was fond of playing about icebergs, and once rowed a boat under a lofty arch, passing quite through the berg, a thing that he could not now be persuaded to attempt. The wind blows rather strongly, and we lie to the leeward of the ice, rolling quite too much for painting. There is no accounting for these currents which flow in upon, and flow away from these bergs. The submarine ice so interferes with the upper and lower streams that the surface water rolls and whirls in a manner upon which you cannot calculate. Under the leeward here, one would naturally suppose that the current would set toward the ice, and require an effort on our part to keep away. The contrary is the case. Two good oars are busy in order to hold us up to our present position. The wind and the swell increase, and so we make sail and scud to some small islands distant half a mile. We moor our boat under the shelter of the rocks and clamber up, look around upon the ruins washed and rusty, and take a run.

At seven o’clock I sit down on the warm side of a crag, and look about with the intention of seeing what there is worth looking at in a spot to which one might flee who was tired of seeing too much. Upon the word of a quiet man, I find myself in the very middle of the beautiful, and ought to be thankful that we are here, and wish that we might be suffered to come again. And what is there here? Wise men have written volumes over less. I do not know but here are groups of the South Sea Isles in miniature. For example, separated from us by a narrow gulf of water, and such clear, bright water, is an islet with a ridge, a kind of half-moon crest, carpeted with olive-tinted moss, over which the lone sun pours a stream of almost blinding light. What glory the God of nature sheds upon these rugged outworks of the earth! The painter that could faithfully repeat upon canvas this one effect of light would leave Claude and Cole, and the like, far enough behind to be forgotten. The wind is lulling; the sun touches and seems to burn the crest of the island opposite, after eight o’clock. C⁠—— is finishing a sketch; the Captain and I have been hunting the sea-pigeons’ nests, a pair of which keep flying off and on; and now the men are making the boat ready for our twilight and evening play around “the ugly iceberg.” How glad the poor little family of ducks must be, from whose home we have driven them, that we are going away. They have been pretending to swim off, and yet have managed to keep back near enough to watch us over the shoulder, ever since we arrived. Timid, cunning fellows, how much they appear to know! A stone disperses them, some to the wing and some to the bottom; and now here they are again, all riding the same swell, and seeming to swim away while they watch our motions, continually turning their slick, black heads quickly over the shoulder.

If you would look upon the perfectly white and pure, see an iceberg between you and the day’s last red heavens. If you would behold perfect brilliancy, gaze at the crest of an iceberg cutting sharply into those same red heavens. To all appearance it will burn and scintillate like a crown of costly gems. In all its notched, zigzag and flowing outline, it palpitates and glitters as if it were bordered with the very lightning. He that watches the Andean clouds of a July sunset, and beholds them rimmed, now with pink and rose-hues, and now with golden fire, will see the edges of an iceberg when it stands against the sky glowing with the yellow and orange blaze of sunset. We go to the skies for pure azure; you will find it at twilight in these wonderful Greenland ices. I am looking now upon what mimics the ruins of a tower, every block of which, in one light, gleams like crystal; in another, as if they had been quarried from the divinest sky. Cloud-like and smoke-like, they look light as the cerulean air. This, as I have said already, is the effect of perfect white seen through deep, transparent shadow. True azure is the necessary result. More than enough, it would seem, has been said of these forms and colors. But really the eye never wearies of these arctic palaces so grandly corniced and pillared; these sculptures so marvellously draped. As we gaze at them, even in this meagre and common berg, under this delicate light veiled with the dusk of evening, they are astonishing in their beauty. I look at them with joyful emotions, with wonder and with love. Why do they not rustle with a silken, satin rustle?

After dark, we sailed round to the northern extremity, where from the lowness of the ice it was more safe to approach it, and dropped sail in order to experiment with the blue lights furnished us by the governor. Rowing up quite closely, within eight yards perhaps, C⁠——, who stood ready upon the bow, fired a couple. In the smoke and glare “we were a ghastly crew,” while the berg was rather obscured than beautified. We then rowed round to the side where the current was setting rapidly towards the ice, and launched a flaming tar-barrel. With a stone for ballast, it kept upright, and floated in fine style directly into the face of the berg—an irregular cliff of sixty feet, pierced with caverns. It was kept for some time under a succession of the brightest flashes of pink light. Upon one slope of the swells the sheaf of red flames gushing from the barrel would be turned from, on the other, toward the ice. Thus the whole eastern front was kept changing from light to darkness, from darkness to light. As the brightness was flung back and forth from the sea to the berg, and from the berg to the sea, the effect was exceedingly novel and beautiful. When the swells bore the full-blown torch into a cave, and its ruddy tongues were licking the green, glassy arches, we hoisted sail and went gaily bounding back to harbor. For a while, the fire shot its fitful rays over the lonely waters, and gleamed “like a star in the midst of the ocean.” At last it was quenched in the distant gloom. A ghostly figure with dim outline was all that was visible, and our work and play with icebergs were over—over forever. It was midnight and past, when we dropped sails alongside the vessel, after a quick run, enlivened, as we entered the harbor, by a sudden display of the northern-light.