The experience of years with icebergs has not made them common things, like the waves and hills, but rather increased the sense of their terrible power and grandeur. They frequently arrive covered with earth and stones, an indication of their recent lapse from the land, and of the brevity of their time upon the sea. During the cold months they are deeply covered with snow, and have a rounded, heavy, and drowsy aspect. It is the warm weather that gives them their naked brilliancy, and melts them into picturesque forms, and rolls and explodes them in the magnificent style, I have attempted to describe. They are seen to move occasionally at the same rate of speed, whether through the densely packed ice or the open sea. Wind, current and tide, and the ocean crowded with ice as far as sight can reach, all frequently set in one direction, and the bergs in another. On they move, majestic and serene, tossing the crystal masses from their shaggy breasts, cracking, crashing, thundering along. There are spaces of dark water spotting the white expanse. It makes no difference; all move on alike. None hastens in the open water; none pauses at the heaped-up banks. All on the surface of the deep is only so much froth before the Alp whose foundations are immersed in the great submarine currents.
He told us a story illustrating the danger of icebergs, and the temerity of making familiar with them. A few years ago, while a French man-of-war was lying at anchor in Temple Bay, the younger officers resolved on amusing themselves with an iceberg, a mile or more distant in the straits. They made sumptuous preparations for a pic-nic upon the very top of it, the mysteries of which they were curious to see. All warnings of the brown and simple fishermen, in the ears of the smartly dressed gentlemen who had seen the world, were quite idle. It was a bright summer morning, and the jolly boat with a showy flag went off to the berg. By twelve o’clock the colors were flying from the icy turrets, and the wild midshipmen were shouting from its walls. For two hours or so they hacked, and clambered the crystal palace; frolicked and feasted; drank wine to the king and the ladies, and laughed at the thought of peril where all was so fixed and solid. As if in amazement at such rashness, the grim Alp of the sea made neither sound nor motion. A profound stillness watched on his shining pinnacles, and hearkened in the blue shadows of his caves. When, like thoughtless children, they had played themselves weary, the old alabaster of Greenland mercifully suffered them to gather up their toys, and go down to their cockle of a boat, and flee away. As if the time and the distance were measured, he waited until they could see it and live, when, as if his heart had been volcanic fire, he burst with awful thunders, and filled the surrounding waters with his ruins. A more astonished little party seldom comes home to tell the story of their panic. It was their first, and their last day of amusement with an iceberg.
It seems rather late in the day for persons of some experience in these regions, to be ignorant of the origin of icebergs. I asked our friend, as I had others, how he supposed that they were formed. He imagined that they were merely the accumulations of loose ice, snow and frozen spray, in the intensely cold regions of the arctic ocean. Piles of broken ice, driven together, and cemented by the heavy snows and the repeated dashing of the surf, would in time become the huge and solid islands that we see. Such is the theory of their formation with all whom I have heard express themselves on the subject, and I believe the one very generally received. When this explanation was objected to, and the facts stated that icebergs were glaciers, first formed on the land, and then launched into the sea, our kind host expressed his doubts more modestly than some others had done of less intelligence and experience.
Speaking of the currents in the straits, he said he could not well conceive any in the world more dangerous. While exceedingly powerful, they were shifting. What rendered this perilous to the last degree, was the excessively deep water and the boldness of the shores. One could toss a bullet into water frequently too deep for the anchorage of smaller vessels. In times of calm, and in connection with the dense fogs peculiar to those coasts, a vessel could not drift about in the straits without the risk of being thrown upon the rocks and lost. When we were lying becalmed off Temple Bay, on Saturday afternoon, he was watching us from a hill-top, and remarked to a neighbor, that he was sorry for the skipper out there, and feared, unless the wind came to his relief before dark, he would get ashore.
He remarked that fresh water may be dipped in winter, from small open spaces in the bay—a fact I do not remember to have read of in the pages of arctic voyagers. I concluded that this only is true, where the water is undisturbed below, and where the open spaces are small, and hemmed in with ice in a way to break off the wind. It is simply rain-water, I suppose, resting upon the surface of the heavier salt water. In the course of the conversation, he stated that there was, at some distance back in the interior, a remnant of the red Indians so called, once a savage and troublesome tribe in Newfoundland. Driven from thence on account of their hostile and untamable nature, they had finally taken refuge in the remote vales of Labrador, where they now live, as is commonly reported, nursing their ancient enmity, but too prudent to reappear among the whites, or let their exact habitation be known.
Pleased with the talk of the fisherman of Chateau, we bade him and his family good-by, and returned on board to a second dinner, a little more to our taste.
CHAPTER LI.
EVENING WALK TO TEMPLE BAY MOUNTAIN.—THE LITTLE ICEBERG.—TROUBLES OF THE NIGHT AND PLEASURES OF THE MORNING.—UP THE STRAITS.—THE PINNACLE OF THE LAST ICEBERG.—THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE.
After dinner and a pleasant conversation on deck, we found time to slip ashore, and thread our way through thickets of sweet-scented spruce to the mountain-top for a prospect. Once in my life, on the borders of a forest pond, in the lower St. Lawrence country, I experienced the plague of black flies to an extent that was quite frightful. I turned from the margin where, head and face covered with handkerchiefs, I was fishing, and ran to a woodman’s hut. The same flies swarmed about us on the mountain of Temple Bay, and drove us down through its evergreens with all the speed it was prudent to make.
In the edge of the twilight, the Captain went across the bay to a little mouse of a berg, that had been all day creeping in from sea, to get a few cakes of ice; and asked our company. Our mouse, as might be expected, turned out to be a lion. We rowed alongside, notwithstanding, and sprung upon his white, glassy back melted all over into a roughness that resembled the rippled surface of a pond. In attempting to walk to a fairy-like bowl, full of that lovely blue water, the painter slipped up, and came near sliding off altogether. But for the Captain, at whose legs he caught as he was going by, he would have had a fine plunge and a ducking. Our chick of a berg, only ten or twelve feet across with a few minute pieces of sculpture in the shape of vases and recumbent animals, lay in its pale green bath like a burr or star, its white points visible at quite a depth—a fact which served to corroborate some experiments we had been making with respect to the parts of an iceberg under water. Here was a mass, with the exception of a few trifling spurs, only a little above the surface, but with a bulk, the extreme points of which were too far below to be discovered. To conclude several amusing liberties we were taking with it, the Captain proceeded to split off a kind of figure-head attached to the main body by a sort of horse-neck, which no sooner fell into the water than our bantling began to imitate the motions of the tallest giant of the icebergs. In making the grand swing, however, it rolled completely over, and came within an ace of catching us upon one of its horns. Anticipating the chance of danger from below, I looked over the side of the boat, when, sure enough, a prong was coming up in a way to give us a toss that would be no sport. A lucky push off saved us. Like the spoke of a big wheel it rolled up, giving us a blow in the ribs as it passed, and a good rocking on the swash. One would scarcely think that there was any excitement in so trifling an incident, but there was, and enough of it to make me resolve to meddle no more with a thing of the kind larger than a lamb. When it settled to rest, it was exactly upside down, and presented a curious specimen of the honey-comb work of the waters. It may occur to some that we were sporting upon the Lord’s Day. Upon reflection I confess that we were, although we might plead the privilege of voyagers, and the long day which touches hard upon our midnight.