The part which had been the top of the glacier had become the bottom of the iceberg. The fragment, when it broke off, had performed an entire half-revolution. Hence it was that no part of it was white. But as the day wore on the delicate hue which it first showed vanished, and before the berg finally disappeared down the fiord it wore the usual opaque white which distinguishes its older brothers who have drifted in Baffin’s Bay for perhaps a score of years.
As may well be supposed, we did not wait for another iceberg to catch us in such a defenseless situation. Our jolly captain was now quite content to own that he held glaciers in profound respect, and lost no time, therefore, in picking up his anchor. Then, as soon as our bruised and thoroughly drenched artists were brought aboard, the Panther wheeled upon her heel and steamed over to the opposite side, where, at a more respectful distance, anchorage was found which promised safety if the glacier should take upon itself once more to perform such fantastic freaks as the one of which we had like to have been victims; and we had no mind now for another such dangerous encounter.
CHAPTER X.
ICEBERGS CRITICALLY EXAMINED.
We named our new harbor “Panther Bay,” and, while resting there until another day comes to invite us to new work and new adventures, let us, more critically than we have had opportunity to do before, examine into the character of these icebergs of the Arctic Sea.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that so few people should really understand what an iceberg is, seeing how few people go where they come from. The icebergs of the Northern hemisphere have but one birthplace: they all come from Greenland—at least all of any magnitude. There are many glaciers in Spitzbergen, some of which reach the sea; but they are of diminutive proportions, and the fragments broken from them are few in number and very small. There are many glaciers in Iceland, but they are confined to the mountains. There are also glaciers upon some of the lands north of Hudson’s Bay; but, like those of Spitzbergen, they occupy a small space compared with the vast accumulations of Greenland. And from Greenland they discharge mostly on the Baffin’s Bay side. In a former chapter we have observed how the ocean current comes from the north along the eastern coast of Greenland, freighted with ice-fields (not bergs), sometimes bearing trees from the Siberian forests. This current sweeps thence around Cape Farewell, and continues north along the Greenland coast, with greater or less velocity, to almost the seventy-fifth or seventy-sixth parallel of latitude, before taking a westerly course, and then again a southerly one to the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and the United States. The icebergs are discharged by the fiords into this current, and the result is that, unless there should be a prevalence of strong northerly winds for a considerable time, sufficient to force them against or across the current and out into the Atlantic, their drift is northerly at all parts of the coast up as far as Melville Bay. The easterly winds, however, affect them; and they are in great numbers blown across Baffin’s Bay until they touch the southerly-setting current, when they drift down into the North Atlantic, as if for no other purpose than to annoy the crews and captains of Liverpool packets and other craft sailing in those waters.
It will thus be seen that, unless driven by the wind, they never leave the great Polar current of the Spitzbergen and Greenland seas, and the waters of the Labrador—a current which is a mighty one and has worked mighty changes on the surface of the earth. We all know and can trace its course now, but that course was once very different. In a remote geological age it must have swept over the greater part of what is now North America, when that land was the bed of the ocean, just as at the present time it sweeps over the growing Banks of Newfoundland. Then Lake Superior discharged into it as a gulf: afterwards, when this gulf became an inland sea, Huron and Michigan were the outlets; afterwards Erie, then Ontario, now the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which latter will, no doubt, in the course of time, form another fresh-water lake of the great chain, as the sea becomes more and more filled up.
We have seen already that many of the icebergs that drift down with this current carry imbedded in them vast quantities of rock and sand, which are, necessarily, deposited at the bottom of the sea when the iceberg melts. Thus do they add something every year, as we have also seen, to the Newfoundland shoals, and likewise strew the ocean bed along their path with gatherings from the Greenland hills. When these now submerged regions come to be elevated above the sea, the geologists of that day will have less trouble to account for the boulders being there than our forefathers had to explain the presence of similar masses of rock on the Illinois prairie, or in the valleys of the Mohawk and Connecticut rivers.
The melting of an iceberg is far from rapid. Many years are required to mingle its crystals with the waters of the ocean. Yet its rate of drift being slow (and it may be held for years grounded among a cluster of islands or among shoals), and the distance great, by the time it has reached the track of vessels the largest part of it has disappeared; and, immense though they sometimes appear to be when seen from the decks of ships crossing to and fro between America and Europe, they are then but a fragment of their former greatness. Indeed, very few of them ever reach so low a latitude at all, going to pieces, little by little, long before the current has carried them so far.
A very homely illustration will bring an iceberg more clearly to the mind of the reader who has never seen one than the most elaborate description.