The wonders of the world

by John Loraine Abbott

Although the assertion that salt water never freezes, has been contradicted by repeated experience, it is still certain that it requires a much greater degree of cold to produce its congelation, than fresh water. It is, therefore, one of the greatest blessings which we derive from this element, that when we find all the stores of nature locked up to us on the land, the sea is, with few exceptions, ever open to our necessities. It is well known that at particular seasons, the mouth of the river St. Lawrence, the entrance into the Baltic sea, &c., are so much frozen over as to be impassable by ships; while the vast mountains and fields of ice in the polar regions, have for ages past been insurmountable obstructions to the daring researches of modern navigators. These exceptions, however, will appear of comparatively trifling importance to navigation, when the number of ports which are, in almost every region, open at all seasons of the year, are considered; and this facility of intercourse would certainly not have been afforded, if sea-water had admitted of as easy a congelation as that of water not impregnated with salt.

On the origin of ice in the frozen seas, different opinions have been entertained. The authority of Capt. Cook and Lord Mulgrave, has been cited by Bishop Watson, to show that good fresh water may be procured from ice found in those seas; but he observes that, notwithstanding the testimonies of these very able navigators, it may still be doubted whether the ice from which the water was obtained, had been formed in the sea, and, consequently, whether sea-water itself would, when frozen, yield fresh water. He thinks it probable that the ice had either been formed at the mouths of large fresh-water rivers, and had thence, by tides or torrents been drifted into the sea, or that it had been broken by its own weight, from the immense cliffs of ice and frozen snow which, in countries where there are few rivers, are found in high latitudes to project a great way into the sea. An early navigator, Fotherbye, in the relation of his voyage toward the south pole, in 1614, considers snow to be the original cause of the ice found at sea, he himself having observed it to lie an inch thick on the surface; and Captain Cook, from his own observation in the South sea, was disposed to think that the vast floats of ice he met with in the spring, were formed from the congelation of snow. It is certain that the snow which falls upon the surface of the sea, being in a solid state, and, bulk for bulk, lighter than sea-water, will not readily combine with it, but may, by a due degree of cold in the atmosphere, be speedily converted into a layer of ice. The upper layer of this first surface of ice being elevated above the surface of the sea, will receive all the fresh water which falls from the atmosphere in the form of snow, sleet, rain or dew, by the successive congelation of which, the largest fields of ice may at length be formed.

It is a matter of little consequence to a navigator, whence the ice which supplies him with fresh water is produced. Leaving, therefore, these hypotheses relative to the formation of ice in frozen seas, it should be observed that the question, whether congealed sea-water will, when thawed, yield fresh water, has been satisfactorily decided by experiments made with every suitable attention. A quantity of sea-water having been taken up off the English coast, was exposed to a freezing atmosphere, and afforded an ice perfectly free from any taste of salt; and it has likewise been found, that not only sea-water, but water containing double the proportion of salt commonly found in our sea-water, and more than is contained in the sea-water of any climate, may be frozen by the cold prevailing in our atmosphere.

ICEBERGS, OR ICE-ISLANDS.

ICE-ISLANDS.

Ice-islands, or icebergs, as they are commonly called, is the name given by seamen to the huge, solid masses of ice which abound in the sea near or within the polar circles, and which often float down nearer to the equator, till they are gradually dissolved by the increasing warmth of the air and water. The cut gives a view of them as seen by Dr. Scoresby, who counted five hundred of them between latitude sixty-nine degrees and seventy degrees north, which were from one hundred to two hundred feet high, and from a few yards to a mile in circumference. Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coasts of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the vessels employed in the Greenland fishery. In the midst of these tremendous masses, navigators have been arrested and frozen to death. In this manner the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished, with all his crew, in 1553; and in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most accomplished seaman could make, to reach the termination of his voyage, was caught in the ice, and nearly experienced the same unhappy fate. The scene he describes, divested of the horrors attendant on the eventful expectation of change, was most beautiful and picturesque. Two large ships becalmed in a vast basin, surrounded on all sides by ice-islands of various forms; the weather clear; the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was smooth, low, even, and covered with snow, except where pools of water, on a portion of the surface, shot forth new icy crystals, and on the smooth surface of the comparatively small space of sea in which they were hemmed. Such is the picture drawn by our navigator, amid the perils by which lie was surrounded.

After fruitless attempts to force their way through the fields of ice, the limits of these became at length so contracted, that the ships were immovably fixed. The smooth extent of surface was soon lost; the pressure of the pieces of ice, by the violence of the swell, caused them to pack; and fragment rose upon fragment, until they were in many places higher than the main-yard. The movements of the ships were tremendous and involuntary, in conjunction with the surrounding ice, actuated by the currents. The water having shoaled to fourteen fathoms, great apprehensions were entertained, as the grounding of the ice, or of the ships, would have been equally fatal: the force of the ice might have crushed them to atoms, or have lifted them out of the water, and have overset them; or, again, have left them suspended on the summits of the pieces of ice, at a tremendous hight, exposed to the fury of the winds, or to the risk of being dashed to pieces by the failure of their frozen dock. An attempt was made to cut a passage through the ice; but after a perseverance truly worthy of Britons, it proved ineffectual. The commander, who was at all times master of himself, directed the boats to be made ready to be hauled over the ice, till they should reach navigable water, proposing in them to make the voyage to England; but after they had thus been drawn over the ice, for three progressive days, a wind having sprung up, the ice separated sufficiently to yield to the pressure of the ships in full sail. After having labored against the resisting fields of ice, they at length reached the harbor of Smeerinberg, at the west end of Spitzbergen.

The vast islands of floating ice which abound in the high southern latitudes, are a proof that they are visited by a much severer degree of cold than equal latitudes toward the north pole. Captain Cook, in his second voyage, fell in with one of these islands in latitude fifty degrees, forty minutes, south. It was about fifty feet high, and half a mile in circuit, being flat on the top, while its sides, against which the sea broke exceedingly high, rose in a perpendicular direction. In the afternoon of the same day, the tenth of December, 1773, he fell in with another large cubical mass of ice, about two thousand feet in length, four hundred feet in breadth, and in hight two hundred feet. Mr. Foster, the naturalist of the voyage, remarks that, according to the experiments of Boyle and Marian, the volume of ice is to that of sea-water as ten to nine: consequently, by the known rules of hydrostatics, the volume of ice which rises above the surface of the water, is to that which sinks below it as one to nine. Supposing, therefore, this mass of ice to have been of a regular figure, its depth under water must have been eighteen hundred feet, and its whole hight, twenty hundred feet: estimating its length, as above, at twenty hundred feet, and its breadth at four hundred feet, the entire mass must have contained sixteen hundred millions of cubic feet of ice.

Two days after, several other ice-islands were seen, some of them nearly two miles in circuit, and six hundred feet high; and yet such was the force of the waves, that the sea broke quite over them. They exhibited for a few moments a view very pleasing to the eye; but a sense of danger soon filled the mind with horror; for had the ship struck against the weather-side of one of these islands, when the sea ran high, she must in an instant have been dashed to pieces. The route to the southward was afterward impeded by an immense field of low ice, the termination of which could not be seen, either to the east, west or south. In different parts of this field were islands, or hills of ice, like those which had before been found floating in the sea.