We now beat slowly up the straits of Belle Isle for the Gulf of St. Lawrence, hoping to pass these dangerous waters by daylight. They are very fair to look upon at this time of day, studded in all directions with those shining palaces of ice seen from the top of St. Charles Mountain. The coast hills have a graceful outline, and slant quite smoothly down, abutting on the sea in low broken cliffs. They resemble the hills of Maine and Canada after April thaws, while the heavier snow-drifts yet remain, and the yellow brown sod is patched with faint green. Forsaken country! if that can be called forsaken which appears never to have been possessed. Doleful and neglected land! Chilly solitude keeps watch over your unvisited fields, and frightens away the glory of the fruitful seasons. The loving sunshine and the healing warmth wander hand in hand tenderly abroad, calling upon the lowly moss to wake up and blossom, and to the tiny, half-smothered, flattened willows to rise and walk along the brook banks. But the white-coated police of winter, the grim snow-drifts, watch on the craggy battlements of desolation, and luxuriance and life peep from their dark cells only to sink back pale and spiritless. To a traveller there is real beauty on the tawny desert and the wild prairie; but there is to me an awful lonesomeness and gloom in these houseless wastes where the eye with an insane perverseness will keep looking for cottage smokes and pasture fences. I think of landscapes drying off after the flood.
The bergs are in part behind us, and we are rocking on the easy swells of Henly Harbor, where we can glean no more signs of human “toil and trouble” than are just enough to tie a name to, and quite a pretty name too. The lazy sails flap idly in the sunshine, and the cold air cuts with the sharpness of a frosty October morning. I sit in the July heat with overcoat, and cloak over the overcoat, woollen mittens and woollen stockings, and with cold feet at that. And yet this miserable shore has, in its cod and salmon, attractions for thousands of people during the transient summer. Even the long and almost arctic winter with its seals and foxes detains hundreds. But, as a fisherman told me one day, while tossing upon the dock with his pitchfork a boat-load of cod, “It is a poor trade.” It is a little trying to patience to be rolling in this idle way, with the creak of spars and the rattling of blocks and rigging, especially as a breeze has been winging the blue water for an hour not more than a mile ahead of us. We do move a little, just a little, enough to keep the hope breathing that we shall soon move off with reasonable speed.
The current is almost a river stream, and we are drifting rapidly, which is not a pleasant thing to be thinking about, with these waters scouring the very banks, and a short cable. I am gazing back upon the southern point of Belle Isle with a mournful interest. It was only the night of the second, the same night we ran into Twillingate to escape a gale, that a vessel was lost there, and all, or nearly all, on board perished. At this moment there is a faint line of white, but not a murmur. All looks quiet there and peaceful, as if the lion was going up to lie down with the lamb.
PLATE No. 6.
ICEBERG IN THE STRAIT OF BELLE ISLE
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
SKETCHING THE PASSING BERGS.—THE STORY OF AN ICEBERG.
The painter is a model of industry, sketching and painting the bergs as we pass them. They are now clustered on the northern horizon, with a few exceptions. We have been for some time near one, out of which might be cut an entire block of Broadway buildings, evidently presenting the same upper surface that it had when it slid as a glacier from the polar shore. If such is the fact, we infer that in its long glacial experience it could not have remained long near any mass of earth higher than itself, for there is not a stone or particle of dust or earthy stain upon it. It is as spotless as a cloud “after the tempest.” How beautiful is the sentiment of it! It carries the imagination away to those heavenly walls depicted in Revelation, and sends it back upon the track of its own story.
The story of an iceberg! yes, indeed; and a most wonderful tale would it be, could it be truthfully written. It would run up into, and become lost in the story of the great glaciers of Greenland; the half of which science itself has not learned, profoundly as it has penetrated the mysteries of the Alpine glaciers.