CHAPTER XXVI.
GULL ISLAND.—THE ICEBERGS OF CAPE ST. JOHN.
Tuesday, July 5. Off Cape St. John, with fog and head winds. We are weary of this fruitless beating about, and resolve to put into smooth water for the sake of relief from sea-sickness. While our English guests seem to enjoy the breakfast, we have gone no further than to sip a little tea, take a few turns on deck in the chilly morning air, and return to the cabin, where I pencil these notes.
There is a dome-shaped berg before us in the mist, but not of sufficient beauty in the dull gray atmosphere to attract attention. Exclamations of our friends on deck have brought me up to look at the ice as we pass it, distant, it may be, five hundred yards. It bears a strange resemblance to a balloon lying on its side in a collapsed condition. It has recently undergone some heavy disruptions, and rolled so far over as to bring its late water-line, a deep and polished fissure, nearly across the top of it.
There is a promise of clear weather. The clouds, to our delight, are breaking, and giving us peeps of the sunny azure far above. The Cape is in full view, a promontory of shaggy precipices, suggestive of all the fiends of Pandemonium, rather than the lovely Apostle, whose name has been gibbeted on the black and dismal crags. The salt of that saintly name cannot save it. Nay, it is better fitted to spoil the saint. Cape St. John! Better, Cape “Moloch, Horrid King,” or some other demon of those that figure in the dark Miltonic scenes. It is terribly awful and impressive. Our lamb, poor innocent, seems to feel lonely under the frown of a coast so inhospitable and savage, and comes bleating around us as if for sympathy. The wind is cold and bracing, sweeping alike the sea and the sky of all fog and clouds, and driving us to heavy winter clothing.
As we bear down toward the Cape, we pass Gull Isle, a mere pile of naked rocks delicately wreathed with lace-like mists. Imagine the last hundred feet of Corway Peak, the very finest of the New Hampshire mountain tops, pricking above the waves, and you will see this little outpost and breakwater of Cape St. John. All things have their uses. Even this bone of the earth, picked of all vegetable growth and beauty, and flung into the deep, has the marrow of goodness in it to a degree that invites a multitude of God’s fair creatures to make it their estate and dwelling-place. Gulls with cimetar-like pinions, cut and slash the air in all directions. Pretty little sea-pigeons fly to and fro, flying off with whistling wings in straight lines, and flying back, full of news, and full of alarm.
A grand iceberg is before us, remarkable, in this particular light, for its pure, white surface. A snow-drift, with its icy enamel, after a silver thaw, might be taken as a model of its complexion. This is a berg evidently of more varied fortunes than any we have yet seen. It is crossed and recrossed with old water-lines, every one of which is cut at right angles with its own system of lines, formed by the perpendicular dripping. It is ploughed and fluted and scratched deeply in all possible directions. At this very moment a new system of lines is rapidly forming by the copiously descending drip, over-streaming all those made when the berg had other perpendiculars. Any large fall of ice, for example, from the opposite side, would bow the berg toward us, sinking the present sea-line on this side, and lifting it on the other. In nearly every case the berg, when it rolls, loses its old horizontal position, and settles in a new one. Immediately a new horizon-line, if it may so be called, with its countless vertical ones, of course, instantly commences forming, to be followed by a similar process, at each successive roll of the berg, unto the end. There are draperies of white sea-shell-like ice, with streaks of shadow in their great folds, which rival the softest azure. Indicative of the projections of the submarine ice, the light-green water extends out in long, radiating points, a kind of emerald spangle, with its bright central diamond on the purple sea.
It is a wonderfully magnificent sight to see an almost black wave roll against an iceberg, and instantly change in its entire length, hundreds of feet, into that delicate green. Where the swell strikes obliquely, it reaches high, and runs along the face, sweeping like a satellite of loveliness in merry revolutions round its glittering orb. Like cumulous clouds, icebergs are perpetually mimicking the human face. This fine crystal creature, by a change in our position, becomes a gigantic bust of poet or philosopher, leaning back and gazing with a fixed placidity into the skies. In the brilliant noon, portions of it glisten like a glassy waterfall. The cold, dead white, the subtle greens, the blues, shadows of the softest slate, all contrast with the flashing brightness in a way most exquisite to behold. True to all the forms of nature that swell to the sublime, an iceberg grows upon the mind astonishingly. On the boundless plains of water, of course, it is the merest molehill: in itself, it has the lonely grandeur of a broad precipice in the mountains.
PLATE No. 2.
A LARGE ICEBERG IN THE FORENOON LIGHT NEAR THE INTEGRITY
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.
Foremost of several bergs, now hovering about the Cape, is one of greater magnitude than any we have previously met. It is, on this front, a broad and lofty precipice, very nearly resembling the finest statue-marble, newly broken. It is losing its upper crags, every now and then, and vibrating very grandly. At short intervals, we hear sharp reports, like those of brass ordnance, followed by the rough, rumbling crash of the descending ice, and the dull roar of its final plunge into the ocean. After this awful burial of its dead, with such grand honors, a splendid regiment of waves retreats from the mournful scene, in a series of concentric circles, rivalling the finest surf that rolls in upon the sand. It is the very flower of the ocean cavalry. Under its fierce and brilliant charge, an ordinary ship’s boat would go down, almost to a certainty. It is what we have been most carefully warned to avoid. This fine iceberg presents, I fancy, much the same appearance it had in the Greenland waters. Its water-line, which is the only one visible, is not less than fifteen feet deep, and rises and falls, in its ponderous rockings back and forth, not more than twenty feet, so vast the bulk below. I have little doubt that the Alpine slopes and summits are its primitive surface.