After Icebergs with a Painter / A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland.

by Louis Legrand Noble

We are coasting along the extreme northern limb of Newfoundland, bound with its endless girdle of adamant, upon which the white lions of old Neptune are perpetually leaping, but which they will never wrench away. The snow lies in drifts along the heights, a novel, but rather dreary decoration for a summer landscape. Between us and the descending sun stands a berg, church-like in form. The blue shadows in contrast with the pure white, have a deep, cloud-like, and grand appearance. It is certainly a most superb thing, rising out of the blue-black waves, now gleaming in the slant sunlight like molten silver. So vast and varied is the scene, at this moment, that many pencils and many pens would fail to keep pace with the rapid description of the mind.

Directly west, is the Land’s End of Newfoundland, Cape Quirpon—in the seaman’s tongue, Carpoon, which we now shoot past. A few miles to the north, as if it might have been split off from the Cape, lies Belle Isle. The broad avenue of dark sea, extending westward between the cape and the island, opens out into the Strait of Belle Isle, and carries the eye to the shore of Labrador, our first view of that bony and starved hermit of a country. In this skeleton sketch, as it shows on paper, there is nothing very remarkable; but with the flesh and the apparel of nature upon it, it is more beautiful than language can paint to the reader’s eye. The entire east is curtained by one smooth cloud, of the hue called the ashes-of-roses. Full against it, an iceberg rises from the ocean, after the figure of a thunderhead, and of the color of a newly-blown rose of Damascus—a gorgeous spectacle. The waters have that dark violet, with a silvery surface, lucent like the face of a mirror, and a complexion in the deeps reminding one of the soft, dusky hues of a Claude Lorraine glass. The painter is busy with his colors, and all are silently opening mind and heart to the universal beauty. We move on over the lovely sea with a quiet gracefulness, in harmony with the visible scene and with our emotions. We are looking for unusual splendors, at the approaching sunset. I close the note-book, and give myself entirely to the enjoyment of the lonely and still magnificence.

The book is open to record. The sun on the rugged hills of Labrador, a golden dome; Belle Isle, a rocky, blue mass, with a wavy outline, rising from the purple main pricked with icebergs, some a pure white, others flaming in the resplendent sunset like red-hot metal. We are sailing quietly as an eagle on the still air. Our English friends are heard singing while they walk the deck, and look off upon the lonesome land where their home is waiting for them.

All that we anticipated of the sunset, or the after-sunset, is now present. The ocean with its waves of Tyrian dye laced with silver, the tinted bergs, the dark-blue inland hills and brown headlands underlie a sky of unutterable beauty. The west is all one paradise of colors. Surely, nature, if she follows as a mourner on the footsteps of the fall, also returns jubilant and glorious to the scenes of Eden. Here, between the white light of day and the dark of the true evening, shade and brightness, like Jacob and the angel, now meet and wrestle for the mastery. Close down along the gloomy purple of the rugged earth, beam the brightest lemon hues, soon deepening into the richest orange, with scattered tints of new straw, freshly blown lilacs, young peas, pearl and blue intermingled. Above are the royal draperies of the twilight skies. Clouds in silken threads and skeins; broad velvet belts and ample folds black as night, but pierced and steeped and edged with flaming gold, scarlet and crimson, crimson deep as blood; crimson fleeces, crimson deep as blood; plumes tinged with pink, and tipped with fire, white fire. And all this glory lies sleeping on the shore, only on the near shore of the great ethereal ocean, in the depths of which are melted and poured out ruby, sapphire and emerald, pearl and gold, with the living moist blue of human eyes. The painter gazes with speechless, loving wonder, and I whisper to myself: This is the pathway home to an immortality of bliss and beauty. Of all the days in the year, this may be the birth-day of the King-of-day, and this effulgence an imperial progress through the grand gate of the west. How the soul follows on in quiet joy, dreaming of lovely ones, waiting at home, and lovely ones departed, waiting with Christ! Here come those wondrous lines of Goethe, marching into the memory with glowing pomp:

. . . . “The setting Sun! He bends and sinks—the day is over-lived. Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life. Oh! that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after, forever after him! I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet,—every height on fire,—every vale in repose,—the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my god-like course. Already the sea, with its heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight. Yet the god seems at last to sink away. But the new impulse wakes. I hurry on to drink his everlasting light,—the day before me and the night behind,—the heavens above, and under me the waves. A glorious dream! as it is passing, he is gone.” . . . . .

Here come the last touches of the living coloring, tinging the purple waves around the vessel. Under the icebergs hang their pale and spectral images, piercing the depths with their mimic spires, and giving them a lustrous, aërial appearance. The wind is lulling, and we rise and fall gracefully on the rolling plain. “The day is fading into the later twilight, and the twilight into the solemn darkness.” No, not into darkness; for in these months, the faint flame flickering all night above the white ashes of day from the west circling around to the north and east, the moonlight and the starlight and the northern-light, all conspire to make the night, if not “more beloved than day,” at least very lovely. A gloomy duskiness drapes the cape, beneath the solitary cliffs of which lies half entombed a shattered iceberg, a ghostly wreck, around whose dead, white ruins the mad surf springs up and flings abroad its ghastly arms. Softly comes its sad moaning and blends with the plaintive melodies of the ocean. Hark! a sullen roar booms across the dusky sea—nature’s burial service and the funeral guns. A tower of the old iceberg of the cape has tumbled into the billows. We gather presently into the cabin for prayer, and so the first scene closes on the coast of Labrador.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE MIDNIGHT LOOK-OUT FORWARD.—A STORMY NIGHT.—THE COMEDY IN THE CABIN.

Past Midnight. I have been up and watching forward for more than an hour, roused from my berth by the cry of ice. A large ship, with a cloud of sail, passed just across our head, bound for Old England. “That’s a happy fellow,” says the man at the helm; “past the dangers of the St. Lawrence and the Straits, and fairly out to sea.” The wind is rising, and promises a rough time. “There is something,” I said to myself, as I leaned, and looked over the bow, “there is something in all this, familiar as it is to many, very grand and awful, as we rise upon the black seas, and plunge into the darkness, rushing on our gloomy, strange way. We seem to be above the very ‘blackness of darkness,’ and riding upon the bosom of the night. The sounding foam, sweeping forward from beneath our bows, looks like a cloud of supernatural brightness, its whiteness filled, as it is, with the fire and electric scintillations of the sea. One could easily imagine himself sailing on the breeze through the night, with sparks of lightning and a cloud at his vessel’s bow.” The wind freshens to a gale nearly, and all hands are called on deck. We are rolling in a most uncomfortable manner, and I have retreated to my cabin, and will creep back to my berth.

Thursday Noon, July 7. A few scrawls of the pencil will serve to give an outline of our experience for the last twelve hours. A dense fog, high wind and a heavy swell. As a matter of course, our little ship has been in great commotion, and we, miserably sea-sick, regardless of breakfast, absent from the cold, wet deck, and rolled up below, dull and speechless in bed. We have been gradually creeping up into the world, of late, sipping a little coffee and nibbling at crackers. We are off Cape St. Louis, the most eastern land of the continent. The few turns on deck have sufficiently electrified the brain to enable me to get on thus far with my notes, and to venture upon a short description of a cabin-scene, at a very late hour last night.