H. M. YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT,” 1855.
2,470 tons; 2,980 h. p.: speed. 16.8 knots; armament, 2 six-pounders; crew, 151 men.
“Struck an Iceberg.—The SS. Etolia on her voyage from Montreal to Bristol narrowly escaped destruction from collision with an iceberg twenty-four hours after leaving the eastern end of Belle Isle straits. A dense fog had set in, the lookout was doubled, and the engines slowed; presently the fog lifted, but only to come down again thicker than ever. In a very short time the lookout called out, ‘Ice ahead!’ The engines were promptly stopped, then reversed at full speed. Meanwhile the towering monster bears down on the ship and in a few seconds is on top of it. It was a huge berg, rising high above the masts of the steamer, which it struck with such a crash that some three hundred tons of ice in huge pieces came down on the forecastle. Fortunately most of it rebounded into the sea, but some forty or fifty tons remained on the ship’s deck. The ship trembled under the blow from stem to stern; her bows were smashed in, but the leakage was confined to the fore-peak. In this battered condition the Etolia lay without a movement of the engines for thirty-six hours until the fog cleared, when Captain Evans had the satisfaction of proceeding on his course and bringing his passengers and crew safely into Bristol harbour.”
A still more serious disaster was reported on August 25th of the same year (1896):
“The captain of the steamer Circassia, of the Anchor Line, had a story to tell, on her arrival at quarantine early this morning, of picking up a captain and his twenty-two men on the high seas from three open boats. It was Captain Burnside and the entire crew of the British tramp steamer Moldavia, bound from Cardiff to Halifax with coal, who were rescued by the timely approach of the Circassia. During the dense fog over the sea on last Wednesday, the Moldavia ran into a huge iceberg and stove her bows so badly that she began to fill rapidly. It was 5.30 o’clock in the afternoon. As soon as a hasty examination showed that it would be impossible to save his ship, Captain Burnside ordered the lifeboats provisioned and cleared away, and as soon as it could be done the steamer was abandoned and shortly afterwards sank. The lifeboats kept together and watched for a passing vessel, and thirty-five hours later the Circassia’s lights were seen approaching. Blue lights were at once shown by the occupants of the lifeboats, and the Circassia altered her course. When near enough, Captain Boothby, of the Circassia, hailed the lifeboats and told the men that he would pick up the boats and their occupants. Accordingly the davits’ tackle were lowered, and as each life-boat approached she was hooked on and raised bodily, occupants and all, to the deck of the Circassia.”
The icebergs of the North Atlantic are natives of Greenland or other Arctic regions where glaciers abound. They carry with them evidence of their terrestrial birth in the rocks and debris with which they are frequently ballasted. The glacier, slowly moving over the beds of rivers and ravines, ultimately reaches the seaboard, to be gradually undermined by the action of the waves, and, finally, to fall over into deep water and be carried by winds and currents into the open ocean. In their earlier stages icebergs are constantly being augmented in size by storms of snow and rain, and by the freezing of the water washed over them by the waves. They are of all sizes, from a mere hummock to vast piles of ice half a mile in diameter, and showing an altitude above the sea of two or three hundred feet, sometimes rising to a height of five and even six hundred feet, and that is scarcely more than one-eighth of the whole mass, for a comparatively small portion only of the bulk projects above the surface, as may be plainly seen by dropping a piece of ice in a tumbler full of water. In proof of this, it is by no means uncommon to find icebergs of ordinary dimensions stranded in the straits of Belle Isle in seventy or eighty fathoms of water. Being frequently accompanied by fog—of which they may be the chief cause—they are often met with unawares, though their nearer approach is usually discovered by the effect which they produce on the air and the water surrounding them, suggesting to the careful navigator the frequent use of the thermometer to test the temperature of the water where ice is likely to be encountered. They are seldom met with below the 40th parallel.
Field-ice, covering a surface of many square miles, with a thickness of from ten to twenty feet, is frequently fallen in with off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Though less dangerous to navigation than the iceberg, it is often a serious obstruction. Vessels that incautiously run into a pack of ice of this kind, or have drifted into it, have often found themselves in a maze, and have been detained for weeks at a time, and not without some risk to their safety in heavy weather.
Tidal Waves.—Notwithstanding elaborate treatment of the subject by hydrographers, stories about ocean tidal waves are most frequently relegated by landsmen into the same category with tales of the great sea-serpent. Sailors, however, have no manner of doubt as to their existence and their force. During violent storms it has been noticed that ocean waves of more than average height succeed each other at intervals—some allege that every seventh wave towers above the rest. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that a sudden change of wind when the sea is strongly agitated frequently produces a wave of surpassing magnitude. Other causes, not so obvious, may bring about the same result, producing what in common parlance is called a “tidal wave.” This is quite different from the tidal wave proper, which periodically rushes up the estuaries of rivers like the Severn, the Solway, the Garonne, the Hoogly and the Amazon. In the upper inlets of the Bay of Fundy, where the spring-tides rise as high as seventy feet, the incoming tide rushes up over naked sands in the form of a perpendicular white-crested wave with great velocity. The tidal wave of the Severn comes up from the Bristol Channel in a “bore” nine feet high and with the speed of a race-horse, while the great bore of the Tsien-Tang-Kiang in China is said to advance up that river like a wall of water thirty feet in height, at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, sweeping all before it.[33] The ocean tidal wave dwarfs these and all other waves by its huge size and tremendous energy. The effective pressure of such a wave being estimated at 6,000 pounds to the square foot, it is easy to understand how completely it becomes master of the situation when it topples over on the deck of a ship. Only once in the course of a good many voyages has the writer been an eye-witness of its tremendous force. The occasion was thus noticed in the New York papers of the 2nd and 3rd of August, 1896:
“The American liner Paris and the Cunarder Etruria, which arrived on Saturday, had a rough-and-tumble battle before daylight on Tuesday morning with a summer gale that had an autumn chill and a winter force in it. The wind blew a whole gale and combed the seas as high as they are usually seen in the cyclonic season. The crest of a huge wave tumbled over the port bow of the Etruria with a crash that shook the ship from stem to stern, and momentarily checked her speed; a rent was made in the forward hatch through which the water poured into the hold, flooding the lower tier of staterooms ankle-deep. The ship’s bell was unshipped, and it carried away the iron railing in front of it, snapping iron stanchions two inches in diameter as if they had been pipe-stems. The Paris, about the same hour and in the same locality, shipped just such a sea as that which hit the Etruria, but received less damage. It fared much worse, however, with the sailing ship Ernest, from Havre, which was fallen in with on the morning of the gale showing signals of distress. The French liner La Bourgogne, came to her rescue and gallantly took off the captain and his crew of eleven men, abandoning the shattered ship to her fate with ten feet of water in her hold.”