There are valleys reaching from the interior to the coast, filled with glaciers of great depth and breadth, which move forward with an imperceptible but regular motion. The continent, as one might call Greenland, does not shed the bulk of its central waters in fluid rivers, but discharges them to the ocean in solid, crystalline, slowly progressing streams. They flow, or rather march, with irresistible, mighty force, and far-resounding footsteps, crossing the shore line, a perpetual procession of block-like masses, flat or diversified with hill and hollow on the top, advancing upon the sea until too deeply immersed longer to resist the buoyant power and pressure of the surrounding waters, when they break upwards, and float suspended in the vast oceanic abyss. The van of the glacial host, previously marked off by fissures into ranks, rushes from the too close embrace of its new element, and wheels away, an iceberg—the glistening planet of the sea, whose mazy, tortuous orbit none can calculate but Him who maps the unseen currents of the main.
When and where, on the lengthy Greenland coast, did this huge block make the grand exchange of elements? Which, if any of these great buildings “not made with hands,” now whitening the blue fields of Neptune, followed or preceded it? What have been its solemn rounds? Through what winters has it slept, and caught the snows upon the folds of its sculptured draperies? How many summers has it bared its spotless bosom to the sun and rains? What nights of auroral splendors have glassed their celestial countenance in its shining mirrors? What baths and vases of blue water have opened their pure depths to moon and stars? What torrents and cascades have murmured in its glassy chasms, crystal grottoes, Alpine dells? And who shall count its battles with the waves and tempests, when with the surf about its shoulders and among its locks, and the clouds around its brow, it stood far up from the unsounded valleys of ocean “tiptoe on the mountain top”?
In the defiles and gorges of the Arctic coast are prodigious accumulations of ice—the congelation of small streams flowing from the adjacent mountains—the glaciers of the coast range, in short. These gradually encroach upon, and overhang the sea; and are continually breaking off, from the undermining of the waves which beat at their base. Such is the depth of water, that the hugest avalanche of ice can fall with safety to itself, and float away.
When, and in what bay or inlet, may this Great Northern have been launched? Out of what gloomy fiord may have rolled the billows, after its icy fastenings were loosed, and it slid, with the thunder of an earthquake, down its slippery ways, and plunged into the black deep?
Until science have her beaten pathway over polar waves and hills, and measure the rain-falls and the snow-falls, and the freezings of the one and the compactings of the other, the story of the glacier and the iceberg, in their native land and seas, will be left, in part, to the imagination—a faculty, after all, that will ever deal with those wonderful ices about as satisfactorily as the faculty that judges according to the sense, as Bishop Leighton calls the mere scientific faculty. The truth of this is illustrated by the very icebergs about us. Emphatically as they speak to the naturalist with his various instrumentalities, they speak, at the same moment, with marvellous eloquence to the poet and the painter. There are forces, motions, and forms, voices, beauties, and a sentiment, which escape the touch of science, and are scarcely caught by the subtle, poetic mind. Icebergs, to the imaginative soul, have a kind of individuality and life. They startle, frighten, awe; they astonish, excite, amuse, delight and fascinate; clouds, mountains and structures, angels, demons, animals and men spring to the view of the beholder. They are a favorite playground of the lines, surfaces and shapes of the whole world, the heavens above, the earth and the waters under: of their sounds, motions and colors also. These are the poet’s and the painter’s fields, more than they are the fields of the mere naturalist, much as they are his. Do not these fifty bergs, in sight from any crag frowning in its iron strength above the surf, speak more a living language to the creative, than to the mensural faculty? Let us see.
They have a daily experience, and a current history more remarkable now than ever. Whatever may have been the wonders of their conception, birth and growth; however lengthy and devious their voyage, they are present in these strange seas, in these tepid waters and soft airs, to undergo their last, fatal changes, and dissolve forever into their final tomb. There are fifty icebergs, more or less. Apparently similar in appearance, yet each differs widely from all others. Exhibiting similar phenomena, yet each has complexions, movements, sounds and wonders of its own. If we choose, though, to add to the performances of to-day, those of yesterday and to-morrow, we shall find that the experience of any one berg closely resembles that of all. The entire circle of its looks and doings corresponds with the circle of nearly every other berg, and so of all together, differing merely in the matter of time—as to when the changes take place. The description upon which I will venture, and which might be gleaned from the foregoing pages, is, therefore, strictly true, except that the phases and accidents are supposed to occur in rapid succession. In a word, what you would behold in all of these fifty, within twenty-four hours, you are to fancy of one, in the course of an afternoon.
I have before me, in my mind’s eye, the Windsor Castle berg, fresh from the north, and the Great Castle berg, of Belle Isle water, which it entered early last May, and as large, at the time of its arrival, as both of them at present combined. And so I am looking at a veritable berg of Cape St. Louis, small, though, in comparison with the berg of Cape St. Francis, “a vast cathedral of dazzling white ice, with a front of 250 feet perpendicular from the sea,” visited by the Bishop of Newfoundland in the summer of 1853.
I will describe, first, the figure of the berg. It is a combination of Alp, castle, mosque, Parthenon and cathedral. It has peaks and slopes; cliffs, crags, chasms and caverns; lakes, streams and waterfalls. It has towers, battlements and portals. It has minarets, domes and steeples; roofs and gables; balustrades and balconies; fronts, sides and interiors; doors, windows and porches; steps and entrances; columns, pilasters, capitals and entablatures; frieze, architrave and cornice; arches, cloisters, niches, statuary and countless decorations; flutings, corrugations, carvings, panels of glassy polish and in the rough; Greek, Roman, Gothic, Saracenic, Pagan, Savage. It is crested with blades and needles; heaped here and there with ruins, blocks and bowlders, splintered and crumbled masses. This precipice has a fresh, sharp fracture; yonder front, with its expanse of surface beautifully diversified with sculptured imagery and other ornament, has the polish of ivory—the glassy polish of mirrors—the enamel of sea-shells—the fierce brightness of burnished steel—the face of rubbed marble—of smoothest alabaster—of pearl—porcelain—lily-white flesh—lily-white wax—the flesh-finish of beauty done in the spotless stone of Italy. This, though, is but the iceberg of the air; the head and crown only of the iceberg of the deep sea.
From the figure of the berg, I will come to describe an important feature of its life and history: its motion; not its movement from place to place, but upon its centre—its rotation and vibration. Where the berg is not grounded—in which case it only beats and sways to and fro, vibrating through the arc of a circle like an inverted pendulum—when it is not grounded, it must be supposed to hang suspended at the surface—all but the topmost part—just under the surface of the ocean, very much as a cloud, a great white thunder-head, hangs suspended in the upper air. Balanced around its heart, far down in the deep, and in its cold solidity “dry as summer dust”—poised upon its centre with perfect exactness, it is evident that the loss of a single ton of ice shifts that centre, shifts it an ounce-notch on the bar of the mighty scale, destroys the equilibrium, and subjects the whole to the necessity of some small movement in order to regain its rest. When, instead of one ton, thousands fall off, it sets a rolling the whole clifted and pinnacled circumference.
And here begins that exhibition of novel forms and shapes, and of awful force, and the sublimity of stupendous masses in motion, that so impresses, awes, startles, and fascinates the beholder. A berg in repose, wondrous as it is to him that dares to linger in its presence, differs from itself in action, as a hero in his sleep differs from himself upon the field of battle.