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

by Louis Legrand Noble

We have rounded an angle to the southern front, and look upon a precipice of newly broken alabaster crowned with a lofty peak and pinnacles. A slight sketch seems to satisfy the painter, and so we pass round to the eastern or ocean side, at which Captain Knight, an experienced iceberger, expresses both delight and surprise. It is a cluster of Alpine mountains in miniature: peaks, precipices, slopes and gorges, a wondrous multitude of shining things, the general effect of which is imposing and sublime. We have been looking out from Battle Island upon this for days, and never dreamed of all this world of forms so grand and beautiful. Besides the main, there are two smaller bergs, but all nothing more than the crowning towers and spires of the great mass under the sea. Here is quite a little bay with two entrances, in which the pale emerald waves dash and thunder, washing the pearly shores, and wearing out glassy caverns. The marvellous beauty of these ices prompts one to speak in language that sounds extravagant. Had our forefathers lived along these seas, and among these wonders, we should have had a language better fitted to describe them. I can easily suppose that there must be a strong descriptive element in the Icelandic, and even in the Greenlandic tongues. I am quite tired of the words: emerald, pea-green, pearl, sea-shells, crystal, porcelain and sapphire, ivory, marble and alabaster, snowy and rosy, Alps, cathedrals, towers, pinnacles, domes and spires. I could fling them all, at this moment, upon a large descriptive fire, and the blaze would not be sufficiently brilliant to light the mere reader to the scene. I will give it up, at least for the present, and remark merely that we have received what the French newspapers occasionally receive—a warning. It came in the shape of a smart cracking of rifles in some large reverberating hall. There is undoubtedly at hand the finest opportunity one could wish of witnessing an ice-fall. As it is now nearly 8 o’clock P. M., and the painting done, we shall take a hasty leave, and content ourselves with a distant view of ice-exhibitions, tame as they are, when contrasted with those more dangerously close by. Our men have had some trouble in keeping the boat up to the berg in the right place for painting, (so powerful is the current on this side setting away,) and are glad of a change.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE SAIL FOR ST. CHARLES MOUNTAIN.—THE SALMON FISHERS.—THE CAVERN OF THE ST. CHARLES MOUNTAIN.—BURTON’S COTTAGE.—MAGNIFICENT SCENE FROM ST. CHARLES MOUNTAIN.—THE PAINTING OF THE RIP VAN WINKLE BERG.—THE ICE-VASE, AND THE RETURN BY MOONLIGHT.

Our sails are up, and we glide landward, stopping to warm at a hut on a rocky islet. Two young fellows, engaged here in the salmon fishery, welcomed us to their cabin, and soon made their rusty old cooking-stove hot enough. The salmon are taken very much like our river shad, in nets set in sheltered waters. We have frequently sailed past them, and seen the salmon entangled in the meshes at quite a depth in the clear sea water, where they have the singular appearance of yellow serpents writhing and bounding in the folds of the seine—an optical illusion caused by the distorting and magnifying effects of the rolling surface. These young fishermen have several hogsheads filled, and are about closing up for the season. They were not a little amused with the idea of our coming so far to visit icebergs, but expressed surprise that we would run the risk of being close about them in such warm weather. After a walk over their island, the merest crest of rough rocks, in a storm washed very nearly from end to end, we set off for St. Charles Mountain, quite lofty and rising perpendicularly from the sea. It is gashed and pierced with black chasms, some of which are whitened with a kind of snowy glacier. We are now approaching a cavern to all appearance spacious enough for the dusk of a very pretty little twilight, with a doorway fifty feet in width and a clear three hundred feet high. The summit of the hill is six hundred and twenty feet above the tide, and the square-headed portal reaches all but half-way up. The ocean goes deep home to the precipice, and so we sail right in. With the wet, black walls and the chilly shade behind, we look back upon the bright, sparkling sea and the shining icebergs. The sound of the waves rings and rolls through the huge space like the deep bass of a mighty organ. We retreat slowly, rising and sinking on the dark, inky swells coming in, and steer for Mr. Burton’s, the sole inhabitant of the small bay close by, where we hope for supper.

Between our landing and the supper, two hours passed, during which C⁠—— painted the Rip Van Winkle berg, and I ascended the mountain. Crossing a little dell to the west of the house, through which flow a couple of tinkling rills bordered with rank grass, and sheeted with flowers white and fragrant, I struck the foot of a small glacier, or chasm filled with perpetual snow, and commenced the ascent. At first I was pleased with the notion of climbing this mer-de-neige, and went up right merrily, crossing and recrossing, stepping sharply into the thawing surface in order to secure a good foothold. But as I wound my way up the cold track, beginning to be walled in by savage crags, it seemed so lonesome, and sounded so hollow below, and looked so far down and steep behind me, that I became suspicious, and afraid, and timidly crept out upon its icy edge, and leaped to the solid cliff. By this time I was too warm with a heavy overcoat, and left it hanging upon a rock against my return. Cold and windy as it was, I was glowing with heat when I reached the top.

The prospect was a new one to me, although long accustomed to mountain views, and more impressive than any thing of the kind I can remember. Rather more than half of the great circle was filled with the ocean; the remainder was Labrador, a most desolate extent of small rocky mountains, faintly tinted here and there with a greenish gray, and frequently slanting down to lakes and inlets of the sea. It may be said that Neptune, setting his net of blue waters along this solitary land, sprung it at last and caught it full of these bony hills, so hopelessly hard and barren, that he, poor old fellow, appears to have thought it never worth his trouble to look after either net or game. Quite in the interior were a few summits higher than the St. Charles, the one upon which I was standing. The sun was looking red and fiery through long lines and bars of dun clouds, and shed his rays in streams that bathed the stern and gloomy waste with wonderful brightness. Seaward, the prospect exceeds any power of mine at description. I have no expectation of witnessing again any such magnificence in that field of nature. Poets and painters will hereafter behold it, and feel how suggestive it is of facts and truths, past, present, and to come. The coast—that irregular and extended line far north, and far away south and west, upon which the ocean and the continent embrace and wrestle—with its reefs and islets, inlets, bays, and capes, waves breaking into snowy foam, twilight shadows streaming out upon the sea from behind the headlands, and the lights of sunset glancing through the gorges and valleys of the shore, all combined to weave a fringe of glory both for land and ocean. The sky over the ocean was of great extent, and gave a wonderful breadth and vastness to the water. There was truly “the face of the deep.” And a most awful, yet a glorious countenance it was, and most exquisitely complexioned, reflecting faintly both the imagery and the hues of heaven, the bright, the purple and the blue, the saffron and the rosy. Belle Isle, with its steep shores reddening with light, lay in the south, lovely to look upon but desolate in reality, and often fatal to the mariner. Looking farther south and southwest, a dark line lay along the sky—the coast of Newfoundland. I was looking up the straits of Belle Isle. All the sea in that quarter, under the last sunlight, shone like a pavement of amethyst, over which all the chariots of the earth might have rolled, and all its cavalry wheeled with ample room. Wonderful to behold! it was only a fair field for the steepled icebergs, a vast metropolis in ice, pearly white and red as roses, glittering in the sunset. Solemn, still, and half-celestial scene! In its presence, cities, tented fields, and fleets dwindled into toys. I said aloud, but low: “The City of God! The sea of glass! the plains of heaven”! The sweet notes of a wood-thrush, now lost in the voices of the wind, and then returning with soft murmurs of the surf, recalled me from the reverie into which I had lapsed unconsciously, and I descended carefully the front of the mountain until I stood just above the portal of the lofty cavern into which we had sailed. The fishing-boats in a neighboring cove, moored for the night, appeared like corks upon the dark water, and Burton’s house like the merest box. He was just ashore from his salmon-nets, and was tossing the shining fishes from his boat to the rocks. I counted seven.

Coming round upon the northern slope, I was tempted by the mossy footing to try the reindeer method, and went bounding to the right and left until I was brought up waist-deep in a thicket of crisp and fragrant evergreens. When I say thicket, do not fancy any ordinary cluster of shrubs, such as is common, for example, among the Catskills. This, of which I am speaking, and which is found spotting these cold hill-sides, is a perfect forest in miniature, covering a space twenty or thirty feet across, compact as a phalanx of soldiery, and from three feet to six inches high. In fact, it reminds me of a train-band standing straight and trim, and bristling with bayonets. The little troop looked as if it was marching up the mountain, the taller ones in front, and the little inch-fellows following in the rear, all keeping step and time. There are gentlemen on the Hudson and around our cities, that would give a thousand dollars for such a tiny little wood. It is an exquisite curiosity, and must excel the dwarf shrubbery of the Japanese. The little trees—no mere yearlings playing forest—are venerable with moss and lichens, and bear the symbols of suffering and experience. All are well-developed, complete trees, mimicking the forms and the ways of majestic firs. The lower boughs droop with a sad, mournful air, and their pointed tops look up into the sunshine and down upon the minute shrubbery below, with the gloomy repose of dark, old pines. It made me laugh. As I waded through the pigmy woods, running my fingers through the loftier tops, as I would run them through the hair of a curly-headed child, and stepping over hills and dales of green forest, I was highly amused, both at the little woodlands and the moral of the thing. Cutting an armful of the sweet-scented branches, and thinking of the children at home as I dinted the mossy pincushions bright as worsted-work all over the ground, I hastened to regain my coat, and get down to the fisherman’s. The painter soon came in, when we sat down to an excellent supper of tea and fried salmon, and presently set sail by moonlight.

Among the incidents of painting the berg, C⁠—— related one of some novelty. It was in deep water, but close to the shore, and so nicely poised that it was evidently standing tiptoe-like on some point, and vibrating largely at every discharge of ice. Near by as it was, he could paint from the shore with security—a rare chance in summer. A heavier fall than usual from the part fronting the land was followed by correspondingly large vibrations, leaving the berg, after it had settled to rest, leaning toward the sea with new exposures of ice. Among these was an isolated mass resembling a superbly fashioned vase. Quite apart from the parent berg, and close to the rocks, it first appeared slowly rising out of the sea like some work of enchantment, ascending higher and higher until it stood, in the dark waters before him, some twenty feet in height—a finely proportioned vase, pure as pearl or alabaster, and shining with the tints of emerald and sapphire throughout its manifold flutings and decorations. It was actually startling. As it was ascending from the sea, the water in the Titanic vase, an exquisite pale green, spouted in all directions from the corrugated brim, and the waves leaped up and covered its pedestal and stem with a drift of sparkling foam. While in the process of painting this almost magical and beautiful apparition, nearly one half of the bowl burst off with the crack of a rifle, and fell with a heavy plunge into the sea. How much in olden times would have been made of this! In the twilight of truth it is easy to see that there is but a step, an easy and a willing step, from plain facts into wild and fanciful forms of superstition. On our way back to harbor, we passed the Rip Van Winkle iceberg, and saw his broken goblet pale and spectral in the moonlight. How lengthy will be the slumbers of the venerable wanderer beneath the shadows of the mountain, there is none but the hospitable Burtons to report. For their sakes, whose salmon-nets his ponderous movements along shore have greatly disturbed, it is to be hoped he will speedily perish and be buried where he is, or wake up and be off to sea with the dignity befitting an iceberg of so much character.

CHAPTER XLVI.

AFTER OUR LAST ICEBERG.—THE ISLES.—TWILIGHT BEAUTIES OF ICEBERGS.—MIDNIGHT ILLUMINATION.