“Some idea of the power exerted on this occasion may be gathered from this:— At the moment which I am now describing, the fore-part of the ship was literally buried as high as the flukes of the anchors in a dock of perpendicular walls of ice; so that, in that part, she might well have been thought immovable. Still, such was the force applied to her abaft, that after much cracking and perceptible yielding of the beams, which seemed to curve upwards, she actually rose by sheer pressure above the dock forward; and then, with sudden jerks, did the same abaft. During these convulsions, many of the carpenters and others stationed below were violently thrown down on the deck, as people are in an earthquake. It was a moment of intense suspense.
“On the 16th, another rush drove irresistibly on the larboard quarter and stern, and forcing the ship ahead, raised her on the ice. A chaotic ruin followed... The ship was careened fully four streaks, and sprang a leak as before. Scarcely were ten minutes left us for the expression of our astonishment that anything of human build could outlive such assaults, when another equally violent rush succeeded; and in its way toward the starboard quarter threw up a rolling wave thirty feet high, crowned by a blue square mass of many tons, resembling the entire side of a house, which, after hanging for some time in doubtful poise on the ridge, at length fell with a crash into the hollow, in which, as in a cavern, the after-part of the ship seemed embedded. It was, indeed, an awful crisis, rendered more frightful from the mistiness of the night and dimness of the moon.
“The poor ship cracked and trembled violently, and no one could say that the next minute would not be her last—and, indeed, his own too, for with her our means of safety would probably perish.”
It is unnecessary to give additional instances of this kind, in order to show the terrible power of field-ice. Indeed, it requires little in the way of illumination to prove that masses of solid matter, many thousands of tons in weight, can, when in motion, utterly destroy the most powerful engines of human construction.
We shall now turn our attention to another, and a very prominent form, in which arctic ice presents itself—namely, that of icebergs.
Chapter Ten.
Icebergs—Their Appearance and Forms—Their Cause—Glaciers—Their Nature and Origin—Anecdote of Scoresby—Risk among Icebergs—McClure’s Experience.
There are not only ice-fields, ice-floes, etcetera, in the polar seas, but there are ice-mountains, or bergs.