It was dead calm,—no, live calm, rather; for never was calm so vivid. The swell had fallen; but the sea breathes and lives even in its sleep. Dawn was already blushing, "celestial rosy red, love's proper hue," in the—east, I was about to say, but north would be truer. The centre of its roseate arch was not more than a point (by compass) east of north. The lofty shore rose clear, dark, and sharp against the morning red; the sea was white,—white as purity, and still as peace; the moon hung opposite, clothed and half hidden in a glorified mist; a schooner lay moveless, dark-sailed, transformed into a symbol of solitude and silence, beneath. I thought of the world's myriad sleepers, and would fain have played Captain Handy to them all. But Nature is infinitely rich, and can afford to draw costly curtains about the slumber of her darling. For, without man, she were a mother ever in anguish of travail, and ever wanting a child to nurse with entire joy at her breast. Sleep on, man, while, with shadows and stars, with dying and dawning of day, not forgetting sombreness of cloud and passion of storm, the eternal mother dignifies your slumber, and waits till her two suns arise and shine together!
Morning,—ice, worlds of it, the wide straits all full! A light wind had been fanning us for the last two or three hours; and now the ice lay fair in view, just ahead. We had not calculated upon meeting it here. At Port Mulgrave they told us that the last of it had passed through with a rush about a week before. Bradford was delighted, and quickly got out his photographic sickle to reap this unexpected harvest: for the wise man had brought along with him a fine apparatus and a skilful photographer. In an hour or two the schooner was up with it, and finding it tolerably open, while the wind was a zephyr, and the sea smooth as a pond, we entered into its midst. Water-fowl—puffins, murres, duck, and the like—hung about it, furnishing preliminary employment to those of our number who sought sport or specimens. It was a delightsome day, the whole of it: atmosphere rare, pure, perfect; sun-splendor in deluge; land, a cloud of blue and snow on one side, and a tossed and lofty paradise of glowing gray, purple, or brown, on the other. The day would have been hot but for being tempered by the ice. This seasoned its shining warmth with a crisp, exhilarating quality, making the sunshine and summer mildness like iced sherry or Madeira. It is unlike anything known in more southern climates. There are days in March that would resemble it, could you take out of them the damp, the laxness of nerve, and the spring melancholy. There are days in October that come nearer; but these differ by their delicious half-languors, while, by their gorgeousness of autumn foliage, and their relation to the oldening year, they are made quite unlike in spirit. This day warmed like summer and braced like winter.
Once fairly taken into the bosom of the ice-field, we had eyes for little else. Its forms were a surprise, so varied and so beautiful. I had supposed that field-ice was made up of flat cakes,—and cake of all kinds is among the flattest things I know! But here if was, simulating all shapes, even those of animated creatures, with the art of a mocking bird,—and simulating all in a material pure as amber, though more varied in color. One saw about him cliffs, basaltic columns, frozen down, arabesques, fretted traceries, sculptured urns, arches supporting broad tables or sloping roofs, lifted pinnacles, boulders, honey-combs, slanting strata of rock, gigantic birds, mastodons, maned lions, couching or rampant,—a fantasy of forms, and, between all, the shining, shining sea. In sunshine, these shapes were of a glistening white flecked with stars, where at points the white was lost in the glisten; in half shadow the color was gray, in full shadow aërial purple; while, wherever the upper portions projected over the sea, and took its reflection, they often did, the color was an infinite, emerald intensity of green; beneath all which, under water, was a base or shore of dead emerald, a green paled with chalk. Blue was not this day seen, perhaps because this was shore-ice rather than floe,—made, not like the floes, of frozen sea, but of compacted and saturated snow.
Just before evening came, when the courteous breeze folded its light fans fell asleep, we left this field behind, and, seeing all clear ahead, supposed the whole had been passed. In truth, as had soon to learn, this twenty-mile strip of shore-ice was but the advance-guard of an immeasurable field or army of floe. For there came down the northern coast, in this summer of 1864, more than a thousand miles' length, with a breadth of about a hundred miles, of floe-ice in a field almost unbroken! More than a thousand miles, by accurate computation! The courtesy of the Westerner—who, having told of seeing a flock of pigeons nine miles long, so dense as to darken the sun at noonday, and meeting objections from a skeptical Yankee, magnanimously offered, as a personal favor, to "take out a quarter of a mile from the thinnest part"—cannot be imitated here. I must still say more than a thousand miles,—and this, too, the second run of ice!
Captain Linklater, master of the Moravian supply-ship, a man of acute observation and some science, had, as he afterwards told me at Hopedale, measured the rate of travel of the ice, and found it to be twenty-seven miles a day. Our passengers were sure they saw it going at the rate of three or four miles an hour. Captain Handy, looking with experienced eye, pronounced this estimate excessive, and said it went from one to one and a half miles an hour,—twenty-four to thirty-six miles a day. Captain Linklater, however, had not trusted the question to his judgment, but established the rate by accurate scientific observation. Now we were headed off by the ice and driven into as harbor on the 22d of June; we left Hopedale and began our return on the 4th of August; and between these two periods the ice never ceased running. The Moravian ship, which entered the harbor of Hopedale half a mile ahead of us, on the 31st of July, pushed through it, and found it eighty-five miles wide. Toward the last it was more scattered, and at times could not be seen from the coast. But it was there; and on the day before our departure from Hopedale, August 3, this cheering intelligence arrived:—"The ice is pressing in upon the islands outside, and an easterly wind would block us in!"
What becomes of this ice? Had one lain in wait for it two hundred miles farther south, it is doubtful if he would have seen of it even a vestige. It cannot melt away so quickly: a day amidst it satisfies any one of so much. Whither does it go?
Put that question to a sealer or fisherman, and he will answer, "It sinks."
"But," replies that cheerful and confident gentleman, Mr. Current Impression, "ice doesn't sink; ice floats." Grave Science, too, says the same.
I believe that Ignorance is right for once. You are becalmed in the midst of floating ice. The current bears you and it together; but next morning the ice has vanished! You rub your eyes, but the fact is one not to be rubbed out; the ice was, and isn't, there! No evidence exists that it can fly, like riches; therefore I think it sinks. I have seen it, too, not indeed in the very act of sinking, but so water-logged as barely to keep its nose out. A block four cubic feet in dimension lay at a subsequent time beside the ship, and there was not a portion bigger than a child's fist above water. Watching it, again, when it has been tolerably well sweltered, you will see air-bubbles incessantly escaping. Evidently, the air which it contains is giving place to water. Now it is this air, I judge, which keeps it afloat; and when the process of displacement has sufficiently gone on, what can it do but drown, as men do under the circumstances? This reasoning may be wrong; but the fact remains. The reasoning is chiefly a guess; yet, till otherwise informed, I shall say, the ice-lungs get full of water, and it goes down.
But we have wandered while the light waned, and now return. It was a gentle evening. That "day, so cool, so calm, so bright," died sweetly, as such a day should. The moon rose, not a globe, but a tall cone of silver,—silver that blushed; ice-magic again. But she recovered herself, and reigned in her true shape, queen of the slumber-courts; and the world slept, and we with it; and in our cabin the sleep-talk was quieted to ripples of murmur.