GULL ISLAND.—THE ICEBERGS OF CAPE ST. JOHN.
TUESDAY, _July 5_. Off Cape St. John, with fog and head winds. We are
weary of this fruitless beating about, and resolve to put into smooth
water for the sake of relief from sea-sickness. While our English guests
seem to enjoy the breakfast, we have gone no further than to sip a
little tea, take a few turns on deck in the chilly morning air, and
return to the cabin, where I pencil these notes.
There is a dome-shaped berg before us in the mist, but not of sufficient
beauty in the dull gray atmosphere to attract attention. Exclamations of
our friends on deck have brought me up to look at the ice as we pass it,
distant, it may be, five hundred yards. It bears a strange resemblance
to a balloon lying on its side in a collapsed condition. It has recently
undergone some heavy disruptions, and rolled so far over as to bring its
late water-line, a deep and polished fissure, nearly across the top of
it.
There is a promise of clear weather. The clouds, to our delight, are
breaking, and giving us peeps of the sunny azure far above. The Cape is
in full view, a promontory of shaggy precipices, suggestive of all the
fiends of Pandemonium, rather than the lovely Apostle, whose name has
been gibbeted on the black and dismal crags. The salt of that saintly
name cannot save it. Nay, it is better fitted to spoil the saint. Cape
St. John! Better, Cape “Moloch, Horrid King,” or some other demon of
those that figure in the dark Miltonic scenes. It is terribly awful and
impressive. Our lamb, poor innocent, seems to feel lonely under the
frown of a coast so inhospitable and savage, and comes bleating around
us as if for sympathy. The wind is cold and bracing, sweeping alike the
sea and the sky of all fog and clouds, and driving us to heavy winter
clothing.
As we bear down toward the Cape, we pass Gull Isle, a mere pile of naked
rocks delicately wreathed with lace-like mists. Imagine the last hundred
feet of Corway Peak, the very finest of the New Hampshire mountain tops,
pricking above the waves, and you will see this little outpost and
breakwater of Cape St. John. All things have their uses. Even this bone
of the earth, picked of all vegetable growth and beauty, and flung into
the deep, has the marrow of goodness in it to a degree that invites a
multitude of God’s fair creatures to make it their estate and
dwelling-place. Gulls with cimetar-like pinions, cut and slash the air
in all directions. Pretty little sea-pigeons fly to and fro, flying off
with whistling wings in straight lines, and flying back, full of news,
and full of alarm.
A grand iceberg is before us, remarkable, in this particular light, for
its pure, white surface. A snow-drift, with its icy enamel, after a
silver thaw, might be taken as a model of its complexion. This is a berg
evidently of more varied fortunes than any we have yet seen. It is
crossed and recrossed with old water-lines, every one of which is cut at
right angles with its own system of lines, formed by the perpendicular
dripping. It is ploughed and fluted and scratched deeply in all possible
directions. At this very moment a new system of lines is rapidly forming
by the copiously descending drip, over-streaming all those made when the
berg had other perpendiculars. Any large fall of ice, for example, from
the opposite side, would bow the berg toward us, sinking the present
sea-line on this side, and lifting it on the other. In nearly every case
the berg, when it rolls, loses its old horizontal position, and settles
in a new one. Immediately a new horizon-line, if it may so be called,
with its countless vertical ones, of course, instantly commences
forming, to be followed by a similar process, at each successive roll of
the berg, unto the end. There are draperies of white sea-shell-like ice,
with streaks of shadow in their great folds, which rival the softest
azure. Indicative of the projections of the submarine ice, the
light-green water extends out in long, radiating points, a kind of
emerald spangle, with its bright central diamond on the purple sea.
It is a wonderfully magnificent sight to see an almost black wave roll
against an iceberg, and instantly change in its entire length, hundreds
of feet, into that delicate green. Where the swell strikes obliquely, it
reaches high, and runs along the face, sweeping like a satellite of
loveliness in merry revolutions round its glittering orb. Like cumulous
clouds, icebergs are perpetually mimicking the human face. This fine
crystal creature, by a change in our position, becomes a gigantic bust
of poet or philosopher, leaning back and gazing with a fixed placidity
into the skies. In the brilliant noon, portions of it glisten like a
glassy waterfall. The cold, dead white, the subtle greens, the blues,
shadows of the softest slate, all contrast with the flashing brightness
in a way most exquisite to behold. True to all the forms of nature that
swell to the sublime, an iceberg grows upon the mind astonishingly. On
the boundless plains of water, of course, it is the merest molehill: in
itself, it has the lonely grandeur of a broad precipice in the
mountains.
[Illustration: PLATE N^o. 2.
A LARGE ICEBERG IN THE FORENOON LIGHT NEAR THE INTEGRITY
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.]
Foremost of several bergs, now hovering about the Cape, is one of
greater magnitude than any we have previously met. It is, on this front,
a broad and lofty precipice, very nearly resembling the finest
statue-marble, newly broken. It is losing its upper crags, every now and
then, and vibrating very grandly. At short intervals, we hear sharp
reports, like those of brass ordnance, followed by the rough, rumbling
crash of the descending ice, and the dull roar of its final plunge into
the ocean. After this awful burial of its dead, with such grand honors,
a splendid regiment of waves retreats from the mournful scene, in a
series of concentric circles, rivalling the finest surf that rolls in
upon the sand. It is the very flower of the ocean cavalry. Under its
fierce and brilliant charge, an ordinary ship’s boat would go down,
almost to a certainty. It is what we have been most carefully warned to
avoid. This fine iceberg presents, I fancy, much the same appearance it
had in the Greenland waters. Its water-line, which is the only one
visible, is not less than fifteen feet deep, and rises and falls, in its
ponderous rockings back and forth, not more than twenty feet, so vast
the bulk below. I have little doubt that the Alpine slopes and summits
are its primitive surface.