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

by Louis Legrand Noble

MOSSES, ODORS AND FLOWERS.—A DINNER-PARTY.

Friday, July 8, 1859. A bright, cool morning. After breakfast at the parsonage, we went rambling again up and down the moss-covered fields of Battle Island, smelling the fine perfume, gathering flowers, and counting the icebergs. There are more than forty in the neighborhood, and some of them grand and imposing at a distance. Have you thought, as I did, that there are no flowers, or next to none, in Labrador? You might as well have thought that all, or nearly all the flowers were in Florida. Along the brook-banks under the Catskills—to me about the loveliest banks on earth, in the late spring and early summer days—I have never seen such fairy loveliness as I find here upon this bleak islet, where nature seems to have been playing at Switzerland. Green and yellow mosses, ankle-deep and spotted with blood-red stains, carpet the crags and little vales and cradle-like hollows. Wonderful to behold! flowers pink and white, yellow, red and blue, are countless as dew-drops, and breathe out upon the pure air that odor, so spirit-like. Such surely was the perfume of Eden around the footsteps of the Lord, walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day. What grounds these, for such souls as write, “The moss supplicateth for the poet,” and the closing lines of the “Ode, Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early Childhood.” The Painter, passionately in love with the flowers of the tropics, lay down and rolled upon these soft, sweet beds of beauty with delight. Little gorges and chasms, overhung with miniature precipices, wind gracefully from the summits down to meet the waves, and are filled, where the sun can warm them, with all bloom and sweetness, a kind of wild greenhouse. We run up them, and we run down them, fall upon the cushioned stones, tumble upon their banks of softness as children tumble upon deep feather-beds, and dive into the yielding cradles embroidered with silken blossoms. Willows with a silvery down upon the leaves, willow-trees no larger than fresh lettuce, and the mountain laurel of the size of knitting-needles, with pink flowers to correspond, cluster here and there in patches of a breadth to suit a sleeping child.

After our ramble, we returned on board, arranged the cabin, now become quite roomy from the departure of our friends, and prepared for dinner, to which a small company is invited. Our cook, a young Sandy, excelling in good nature, but failing in all the essentials of his art, was suspended, for the time, from the exercise of all duties about the caboose, except those of the mere lackey, and two more important personages self-inducted into his place. Some pounds of fresh salmon bagged in linen, a measure of peeled potatoes, a pudding of rice well shotted with raisins, one after another, found their way to the oven and the boilers; from which, in due time and order, they emerged in a satisfactory condition, and, with appropriate sauce and gravy, descended in savory procession to the cabin, to which they were unexpectedly welcomed by a whole dress circle of fashionable dishes seated in the surrounding berths, jelly-cake, sponge-cake, raspberry-jam, nuts, figs, almonds and raisins, and a corpulent pitcher, sweating in his naked white, filled with iceberg water. It is not necessary to dwell upon the fact, that the cooks subsided into the more quiet character of hosts, and made themselves, and endeavored to make their guests, merry at their own expense. Whether the Queen of England, or the President of the United States will be pleased, it never occurred to us at the time, when, without thinking of either, we drank to their health in the transparent vintage of Greenland.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

OUR BOAT FOR THE ICEBERGS.—AFTER THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDY OF ITS WESTERN FACE.

After dinner. Mr. Hutchinson has placed at our service his parish vessel, at once a schooner and a row-boat, of which Captain Knight, of course, is master, and our men the sailors. We are all ready, waiting its arrival alongside, in order for our first excursion after icebergs, equipped entirely to our mind.

An hour’s sail has brought us off into the broad waters, south of Battle Harbor, close to a berg selected from the heights this morning. We drop sails, and row rapidly around it, for the best point of observation in the present light. The intention is to study the ices of these waters, at all points, and in all lights, with great care. From this, the western side, now glittering in the face of the sun, at six o’clock, it is alpine in its form, with one crowning peak, supported by pinnacles and buttresses, with intervening gulfs and hollows, each with its torrent hissing along down in white haste over glassy cliffs and in alabaster channels, until it comes spouting into the sea from an overhanging precipice, varying from six, to twenty feet in height. Between the upper edge of this ice-coast and the great steeps of the berg, lies a broad slope, smooth as ivory, a paradise for the boys of a village school. We are actually tempted to land at a low place, and have a run. Without skates, or some arming of the boots, however, we guess it would be rather perilous sport; in short, simply impossible. We content ourselves with catching a panfull of water, fresh from the great Humboldt glacier, quite likely, and cold and pure it is. While we are busy at the fountain, we amuse ourselves with looking down through the clear, green water—right under us, clear almost as air—at the roots and prongs of the mountain mass. They shoot out into the dark sea below far beyond our boat, not a pleasing vision to dwell upon, when we reflect, that these very prongs and spurs only wait to take their turn in the sunshine, under the aspect of upright towers. A heavy fall of ice, which may happen in a minute, on the opposite side of the berg, instantly gives the preponderance to this, when over this way slowly rolls the alpine peak, down sinks all this precipice, and after it, all the slanting field above; then on rushes the sea in curling waves, and we are swept on with them. Before we can get back, and get away to a safe distance, by the force of mere sailor power, back rolls the berg, up rises the broad slope, followed quickly by the precipices rising up, up, and up into lofty cliffs, with a foreground, a new revelation of ice; in a word, the prongs and spurs now below us in the transparent deep. In all this play of the iceberg and the sea, what will be our part? And who knows whether the moment is not now close upon us for this sparkling planet of the main to burst asunder, a common process by which the mother berg throws off her little ones, rather, resolves herself entirely into a shoal of small icebergs? Should that moment really come while we are in this fearful proximity, you need not ask any questions about us, except those which you yourself can answer. There are the dead in these very waters, I believe, whose last earthly experience was among the final thunders of these ices.

I am struck with the rapid rate at which the bergs are perishing. They are dissolving at every point and pore, both in the air and in the sea. One sheet of water, although no thicker than a linen sheet, covers the entire alp. It trickles from every height, yonder glimmering like a distant window in the sunset, here cutting into the glassy surface and working out a kind of jewelry, which sparkles with points of emerald and ruby. It rains from eves and gables, cornices and balconies, and spouts from gutters. All around, there is the pattering of a shower on the sea, and the sharp, metallic ringing of great drops, similar to what is heard around a pond in the still woods, when the dew-drops fall from the overhanging boughs. Below, the currents, now penetrated with the summer warmth, are washing it away. Around the surface-line, the ever-busy waves are polishing the newly-broken corners, and cutting under, and mining their way in, with deceitful rapidity. Unceasingly they bore and drill, without holiday or sabbath, or rest at night, as the perpetual thunders of their blasting testify. Thus their ruin is hourly hastening to a consummation, and the danger of approaching them made more and more imminent. The iceberg in winter, in the Arctic regions, and even here, is a different affair. In the cold, they are tolerably safe and sound. But now, in these comparatively tepid seas, and in this warm atmosphere, lone wanderer, it finds no mercy. Motionless as this and several bergs appear, they are all slowly moving in toward the Strait of Belle Isle, borne forward by the great Baffin current, a stream of which bends around Cape St. Louis and these adjacent isles, and sets along the shore of Labrador into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDIES OF ITS SOUTHERN FRONT.—FRIGHTFUL EXPLOSION AND FALL OF ICE.—STUDIES OF THE WESTERN SIDE.—OUR PLAY WITH THE MOOSE HORNS.—THE SPLENDOR OF THE BERG IN THE SUNSET.