LIFTED BY THE ICE.
AMONG THE ICEBERGS.
Through all this grinding tossing mass come majestically floating southward huge icebergs, passing through all this strife, and heeding it as little as some cliff the waves that dash and roar about its base and cover it with spray. Sometimes these mighty masses are no pleasant neighbors, for as they float southward under the ever increasing heat of the sun, during the months of July and August large cataracts pour from them, and the whole mass becomes rotten and suddenly goes to pieces in huge fragments each as large as a ship, which would inevitably destroy anything with which they came into contact. Dr. Hayes’ vessel, the United States, had a narrow escape from destruction in this way. For four days they had been sailing through seas where the bergs seemed to be countless, some a mile in length and towering high in air, others no larger than the ship itself. In a calm, the vessel had drifted close to one which looked particularly dangerous, and before a rope could be made fast to another berg and the ship be hauled from its unsafe position, it had struck. Though the collision was a slight one, such masses of ice came rattling down upon the deck as to render anything but pleasant the position of the men stationed there. Suddenly a huge mass of the submerged part broke off and came to the surface, lashing it to foam. Then a succession of loud reports was heard, and vast masses broke off the opposite side of the berg, causing it to reel to and fro, and sending showers of ice on the vessel’s deck. By this time the crew sent out to make fast a rope to another berg gave the signal to haul, and never did men pull more lustily; and with good reason, for they had barely got clear when with a loud report the whole top broke loose, and fell exactly where the vessel had lain a few minutes before, causing a swell on which the ship tossed to and fro as if in a gale. Soon after a huge berg in the distance began to go to pieces. “First a lofty tower came plunging into the water, starting from their inhospitable perch an immense flock of gulls that went screaming into the air; over went another; then a whole side settled squarely down; then the wreck capsized, and at length after five hours of rolling and crashing, there remained of this splendid mass, not a fragment that rose fifty feet above the water. Another, which appeared to be a mile in length and upwards of a hundred feet in height, split in two with a quick, sharp, and at length long rumbling report, which could hardly have been exceeded by a thousand pieces of artillery simultaneously discharged.” Lofty as are these icebergs, the part above water gives no true idea of their vast size. It has been computed that of fresh water ice floating in salt water, only one-seventh is visible above the sea. In 1860, a huge iceberg lay off the little harbor of Tessuissak on the Greenland coast. It had grounded there two years before, and had not moved since. It was three-quarters of a mile in length and towered by actual measurement, three hundred and fifteen feet in the air, so that it must have come to anchor in water half a mile in depth.
