It is extremely dangerous to approach these cliffs of ice, as every now and then large blocks detach themselves from the mass, and frequently even a concussion of the air is enough to make them fall.
During the busy period of Spitzbergen history, when its bay used to be frequented by whalers who anchored under the glacier-walls, these ice-avalanches often had disastrous consequences. Thus, in the year 1619, an English ship was driven by a storm into Bell Sound. While it was passing under a precipice of ice, a prodigious mass came thundering down upon it, broke the masts, and threw the ship so violently upon one side that the captain and part of the crew were swept into the sea. The captain escaped unhurt, but two sailors were killed and several others wounded.
One day a gun was fired from a boat of the Trent when about half a mile from one of the glaciers of Magdalena Bay. Immediately after the report of the musket, a noise resembling thunder was heard in the direction of the ice-stream, and in a few seconds more an enormous mass detached itself from its front, and fell into the sea. The men in the boat, supposing themselves to be beyond the reach of its influence, were tranquilly contemplating the magnificent sight, when suddenly a large wave came sweeping over the bay, and cast their little shallop to a distance of ninety-six feet upon the beach.
Another time, when Franklin and Beechey had approached one of these ice-walls, a huge fragment suddenly slid from its side, and fell with a crash into the sea. At first the detached mass entirely disappeared under the waters, casting up clouds of spray, but soon after it shot up again at least 100 feet above the surface, and then kept rocking several minutes to and fro. When at length the tumult subsided, the block was found to measure no less than 1500 feet in circumference; it projected 60 feet above the water, and its weight was calculated at more than 400,000 tons.
Besides the glaciers of Magdalena Bay, Spitzbergen has many others that protrude their crystal walls down to the water’s edge; and yet but few icebergs, and the largest not to be compared with the productions of Baffin’s Bay, are drifted from the shores of Spitzbergen into the open sea. The reason is that the glaciers usually terminate where the sea is shallow, so that no very large mass if dislodged can float away, and they are at the same time so frequently dismembered by heavy swells that they can not attain any great size.
The interior of Spitzbergen has never been explored. According to the Swedish naturalists,[8] who climbed many of the highest mountains in various parts of the coast, all the central regions of the archipelago form a level ice-plateau, interrupted only here and there by denuded rocks, projecting like islands from the crystal sea in which they are imbedded. The height of this plateau above the level of the ocean is in general from 1500 to 2000 feet, and from its frozen solitudes descend the various glaciers above described. During the summer months, the radiation of the sun at Spitzbergen is always very intense, the thermometer in some sheltered situations not seldom rising at noon to 62°, 67°, or even 73°. Even at midnight, at the very peak of the high mountain ascended by Scoresby, the power of the sun produced a temperature several degrees above the freezing-point, and occasioned the discharge of streams of water from the snow-capped summit. Hence, though even in the three warmest months the temperature of Spitzbergen does not average more that 34½°, yet in the more southern aspects, and particularly where the warmth of the sun is absorbed and radiated by black rock-walls, the mountains are not seldom bared at an elevation nearly equal to that of the snow-line of Norway, and various Alpine plants and grasses frequently flourish, not only in sheltered situations at the foot of the hills, but even to a considerable height, wherever the disintegrated rocks lodge and form a tolerably good soil.
The Flora of Spitzbergen consists of about ninety-three species of flowering or phenogamous plants, which generally grow in isolated tufts or patches; but the mosses which carpet the moist lowlands, and the still more hardy lichens, which invest the rocks with their thin crusts or scurfs as far as the last limits of vegetation, are much more numerous. Some of the plants of Spitzbergen are also found on the Alps beyond the snow-line, at elevations of from 9000 to 10,000 feet above the level of the sea. According to Mr. Martins, nothing can give a better idea of Spitzbergen than the vast circus of névé, in the centre of which rises the triangular rock known to the visitors of Chamonny as the Jardin or the Courtil. Let the tourist, placed on this spot at a time when the sun rises but little above the horizon, or better still, when wreaths of mist hang over the neighboring mountains, fancy the sea bathing the foot of the amphitheatre of which he occupies the centre, and he has a complete Spitzbergen prospect before him. Supposing him to be a botanist, the sight of the Ranunculus glacialis, Cerastium alpinum, Arenaria biflora, and Erigeron uniflorus will still further increase the illusion.
The only esculent plant of Spitzbergen is the Cochlearia fenestrata, which here loses its acrid principles, and can be eaten as a salad. The grasses which Keilhau found growing near some Russian huts in Stans Foreland are during the summer a precious resource for the reindeer, which, though extremely shy, make their appearance from time to time in every part of the land from the Seven Islands to South Cape, and are more abundant than could have been expected. The Polar bears are probably their only native enemies on these islands, and their fleetness furnishes them with ample means of escape from a pursuer so clumsy on land. Lord Mulgrave’s crew killed fifty deer on Vogelsang, a noted hunting-place, and on Sir Edward Parry’s polar expedition about seventy deer were shot in Treurenberg Bay by inexperienced deer-stalkers, and without the aid of dogs. During the winter these large herbivora live on the Icelandic moss which they scent under the snow, but it may well be asked where they find shelter in a naked wilderness without a single tree. In May and June they are so thin as scarcely to be eatable, but in July they begin to get fat, and then their flesh would everywhere be reckoned a delicacy.
Besides the reindeer, the only land-quadrupeds of Spitzbergen are the Polar bear, the Arctic fox, and a small field-mouse, which in summer has a mottled, and in winter a white fur.
Of the birds, the hyperborean ptarmigan (Lagopus hyperborea), which easily procures its food under the snow, undoubtedly winters in Spitzbergen, and probably also the lesser red-pole, which perhaps finds grass seeds enough for its subsistence during the long polar nights, while the snow-bunting (Plectrophanes nivalis), and the twenty species of water-fowl and waders that frequent the shores of the high northern archipelago during the summer, all migrate southward when the long summer’s day verges to its end.