OUR BOAT FOR THE ICEBERGS.—AFTER THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDY OF ITS
WESTERN FACE.
AFTER dinner. Mr. Hutchinson has placed at our service his parish
vessel, at once a schooner and a row-boat, of which Captain Knight, of
course, is master, and our men the sailors. We are all ready, waiting
its arrival alongside, in order for our first excursion after icebergs,
equipped entirely to our mind.
An hour’s sail has brought us off into the broad waters, south of Battle
Harbor, close to a berg selected from the heights this morning. We drop
sails, and row rapidly around it, for the best point of observation in
the present light. The intention is to study the ices of these waters,
at all points, and in all lights, with great care. From this, the
western side, now glittering in the face of the sun, at six o’clock, it
is alpine in its form, with one crowning peak, supported by pinnacles
and buttresses, with intervening gulfs and hollows, each with its
torrent hissing along down in white haste over glassy cliffs and in
alabaster channels, until it comes spouting into the sea from an
overhanging precipice, varying from six, to twenty feet in height.
Between the upper edge of this ice-coast and the great steeps of the
berg, lies a broad slope, smooth as ivory, a paradise for the boys of a
village school. We are actually tempted to land at a low place, and have
a run. Without skates, or some arming of the boots, however, we guess it
would be rather perilous sport; in short, simply impossible. We content
ourselves with catching a panfull of water, fresh from the great
Humboldt glacier, quite likely, and cold and pure it is. While we are
busy at the fountain, we amuse ourselves with looking down through the
clear, green water—right under us, clear almost as air—at the roots
and prongs of the mountain mass. They shoot out into the dark sea below
far beyond our boat, not a pleasing vision to dwell upon, when we
reflect, that these very prongs and spurs only wait to take their turn
in the sunshine, under the aspect of upright towers. A heavy fall of
ice, which may happen in a minute, on the opposite side of the berg,
instantly gives the preponderance to this, when over this way slowly
rolls the alpine peak, down sinks all this precipice, and after it, all
the slanting field above; then on rushes the sea in curling waves, and
we are swept on with them. Before we can get back, and get away to a
safe distance, by the force of mere sailor power, back rolls the berg,
up rises the broad slope, followed quickly by the precipices rising up,
up, and up into lofty cliffs, with a foreground, a new revelation of
ice; in a word, the prongs and spurs now below us in the transparent
deep. In all this play of the iceberg and the sea, what will be our
part? And who knows whether the moment is not now close upon us for this
sparkling planet of the main to burst asunder, a common process by which
the mother berg throws off her little ones, rather, resolves herself
entirely into a shoal of small icebergs? Should that moment really come
while we are in this fearful proximity, you need not ask any questions
about us, except those which you yourself can answer. There are the dead
in these very waters, I believe, whose last earthly experience was among
the final thunders of these ices.
I am struck with the rapid rate at which the bergs are perishing. They
are dissolving at every point and pore, both in the air and in the sea.
One sheet of water, although no thicker than a linen sheet, covers the
entire alp. It trickles from every height, yonder glimmering like a
distant window in the sunset, here cutting into the glassy surface and
working out a kind of jewelry, which sparkles with points of emerald and
ruby. It rains from eves and gables, cornices and balconies, and spouts
from gutters. All around, there is the pattering of a shower on the sea,
and the sharp, metallic ringing of great drops, similar to what is heard
around a pond in the still woods, when the dew-drops fall from the
overhanging boughs. Below, the currents, now penetrated with the summer
warmth, are washing it away. Around the surface-line, the ever-busy
waves are polishing the newly-broken corners, and cutting under, and
mining their way in, with deceitful rapidity. Unceasingly they bore and
drill, without holiday or sabbath, or rest at night, as the perpetual
thunders of their blasting testify. Thus their ruin is hourly hastening
to a consummation, and the danger of approaching them made more and more
imminent. The iceberg in winter, in the Arctic regions, and even here,
is a different affair. In the cold, they are tolerably safe and sound.
But now, in these comparatively tepid seas, and in this warm atmosphere,
lone wanderer, it finds no mercy. Motionless as this and several bergs
appear, they are all slowly moving in toward the Strait of Belle Isle,
borne forward by the great Baffin current, a stream of which bends
around Cape St. Louis and these adjacent isles, and sets along the shore
of Labrador into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.