“The fog gradually lifted, now in one direction, and now in another, just sufficient to discover to us, that we were fairly surrounded, and that, to whatever point of the compass we could turn the eye or the ship, interminable masses of drift-ice, of uplift, and icebergs, seemed to cover the sea. So sudden and unexpected was this discovery, that it seemed more like fairy work than reality. Surprise and astonishment, at the novel and wonderful scene around us, seemed at first to make us all unconscious of our own critical situation. Separating from it the idea of danger, it would be difficult to imagine a scene combining and blending more of the elements of beauty, grandeur and sublimity. Far as the eye could reach, it was no longer sea and sky, but ice, ice, ice, floating like an archipelago of a thousand isles, great and small, of highland and lowland, mountain, peninsula, promontory, and Gibraltar rock.
“Running in countless directions through these masses, the ocean waves appeared in narrow but doubly dark currents, forming the most crooked and irregular passages, of rivulet and river, and endless indentations of inlet and bay. Through these labyrinthine passages, perpetually opening and closing by the action of winds and waves, our escape was to be made. Once, in attempting to force a passage through a long but narrow neck of broken blocks of ice, which had drifted across our way, the cutwater, bows and wheels of the ship, were pretty seriously battered.
“All night long the ship was kept running slowly, threading her way through these little passages of clear water, until four o’clock in the morning, when she was so pressed on every side, with sheets of ice, crowded and packed far above the surface of the water, and urged on by the momentum of vast masses of iceberg, that prudence required to stop the engine and wait for daylight. The morning brought little cheering prospect. The man at mast-head reported no clear water, as far as the eye could reach, excepting in narrow and scarcely navigable patches and veins. The surface of the sea all around the horizon, seemed an almost unbroken plain of field and mountain ice. As early as light allowed, the ship was again under way for the largest space of clear water that could be seen, and continued all day long to retrace her path to the westward, veering her course, however, through every point of the compass, to find the intricate passages toward the open sea. The wind, fresh from the north-west, came with intense and piercing cold. The man at the mast-head could not stand its severity more than half an hour. The masts, shrouds and cordage of the ship, were completely incrusted, and altogether what with field-ice, drift, and icebergs, snow, rain and hail, gale and storm, these days in the ice will not soon be forgotten.
“The different aspects of these scenes by day and night furnished an incessant source of interest. The vast fields of drift, in their varied forms, by daylight and by moonlight, were picturesque and beautiful in the highest degree. They ranged in extent from a quarter of a mile, to perhaps ten miles square. In some cases, the entire field seemed to be composed of small broken fragments, floating in close proximity to each other, yet yielding readily to the play of the waves, rising and falling with the swell of the sea. The superincumbent weight upon the surface of the water, diminished the elevation of the waves, but the reflected light from its uneven silver surface, revealed far more distinctly and beautifully, the extent of motion and the action of the waves. The long swells of the sea stretched away in graceful curves for miles, resembling more than anything else I can suggest, some of the rolling prairies of the west, as they must appear in snow, with this difference, that the swells seemed ‘all alive,’ as if some mighty monsters of the deep were working their way beneath, perpetually shifting their position, and vainly endeavoring to lift the load that covers them, to find a breathing in the open air. In other instances, these vast fields, stretching as far as the eye could reach over half the visible horizon, were one compact and apparently motionless mass of solid ice, as fixed as a ‘rock-bound coast.’
“Another form of peculiar interest was that of a wide field, of many miles in extent, apparently formed by a long succession of ‘uplifts.’ The action of the waves had gradually forced large blocks of ice beneath one edge, and the long continuation of this process, had lifted as it would seem, almost the entire mass, many feet out of water. The outer edge of these uplifts presented an abrupt and perpendicular wall. In one case, at night, the captain estimated that he had sailed for ten miles, along such a wall, the hight of the wheel-house, about forty feet. A very beautiful effect was once produced by a small mass of this kind. It was several miles distant, and of very considerable length. As it rolled and pitched, one side, apparently fifteen or twenty feet high, dipped in the waves, and rising again, lifted an immense volume of water, which then ran off, in a beautiful and magnificent torrent, over the rising edge. I watched with my glass for an hour, the graceful evolutions of this interesting cataract, which is probably still performing, by its regular rise and fall, a very respectable, but intermittent Niagara, in the middle of the Atlantic, with all the regularity of a pendulum.
“The icebergs, themselves, which we saw, were very numerous, and of almost every conceivable form and size. During our passage through three hundred miles, the number we observed was variously estimated from five hundred to one thousand. I counted at one time thirty-six, and at another forty-five, all of notable magnitude. They sometimes were of most curious and fantastic shapes. Hill and mountain of every imaginable outline, castle and tower, turret, and out-jutting and overhanging crags, magnificent needle forms shooting to the sky, like the spire of Trinity, crouching lions, and polar bears, trees of ice, and natural bridges, in short, you can scarcely fancy anything odd, that snow and ice can be made to resemble, that had not its type around us.
“But, perhaps, the most wonderful of all, was the great ‘plunging iceberg.’ It was a round, oblong mass of ice, estimated by careful comparison with our wheel-house, to be fifty by seventy-five feet. A side view made it appear about as large as the front of a large, double, four story dwelling. But it was as true and perfect an oval, as the most exquisitely beautiful bald head you have ever seen. It looked exactly like the upper part of a head of some gigantic being. This, as it floated past us, gradually descended in the waves, until it sunk beneath the surface. It then rose with a most majestic movement, lifting the pure white crown, to the hight of fifty feet. It presented on the whole, one of the grandest sights I ever beheld. It continued thus sinking and rising till it was out of our sight. It seemed like a creature of life, paying its respects to our noble ship.”
ICEBERGS.
Analogous to the ice-fields described above, are those large bodies of ice, perhaps more properly named icebergs, which fill the valleys between the high mountains in northern latitudes. Among the most remarkable, are those of the east coast of Spitzbergen. They are seven in number, and lie at considerable distances from each other, extending through tracts unknown, in a region totally inaccessible in the internal parts. The most distant of them exhibits over the sea a front three hundred feet in hight, emulating the color of the emerald; cataracts of melted snow fall down in various parts; and black, spiral mountains, streaked with white, bound the sides, rising crag above crag, as far as the eye can reach in the background. At times immense fragments break off, and precipitate themselves into the water with a most alarming dashing. A portion of this vivid green substance was seen by Lord Mulgrave, in the voyage above referred to, to fall into the sea; and, notwithstanding it grounded in twenty-four fathoms of water, it spired above the surface fifty feet. Similar icebergs are frequent in all the arctic regions; and to their fall is owing the solid mountainous ice which infests those seas.
The frost sports wonderfully with these icebergs, and gives them majestic, as well as other most singular forms. Masses have been seen to assume the shape of a Gothic church, with arches, windows and doors, and all the rich drapery of that style of architecture, composed of what the writer of an Arabian tale would scarcely have ventured to introduce among the marvelous suggestions of his fancy, crystals of the richest sapphirine blue. Tables with one or more feet; and often immense flat-roofed temples, like those of Luxor, on the bank of the Nile, supported by round transparent columns of cerulean hue, float by the astonished spectator. These icebergs are the creation of ages, and acquire annually additional hight by falls of snow and rain, which latter often freezes instantly, and more than repairs the loss occasioned by the influence of the sun’s heat.