AFTER OUR LAST ICEBERG.—THE ISLES.—TWILIGHT BEAUTIES OF
ICEBERGS.—MIDNIGHT ILLUMINATION.
FRIDAY, _July 15_. This is another of the summer days of Labrador, with
a soft, southerly wind, tempting one to ramble in spite of musquitoes
and black flies, which, though few, are uncommonly pestilent. The
painter is sleeping from very weariness, and I am loitering about these
cliffs, note-book in hand, in a drowsy state, for a similar reason.
These long days and late hours about headlands and icebergs are attended
with their pains as well as pleasures. From the tenor of my pages one
would think that all was joyous and interesting. Let him reflect, that
for his sake I record the joyous and the interesting, and pass by the
dull and the vexatious. I flit from frowning cliff to cliff where the
surf thunders and Leviathan spends his holiday among the capelin, and
linger in the sunshine and shadow of an iceberg, the choicest among
fifty, but give you but a suspicion of the common things between. The
sparkling points of the life of this novel voyage are for the reader’s
eye; the chill and the weariness, and the sea-sickness, and the mass of
things, lumpish and brown in “the light of common day,” are for that
tomb of the Capulets away back in the fields of one’s own memory. But to
return: this kind of life begins to wear upon us, to wear upon the
nerves, and suggests the importance of keeping dull and still awhile.
I find myself looking towards home, looking that way over the sea from
the hill-tops, and rather dreading the rough and tumble and chances of
the journey. I regret that time will not permit a continuation of the
voyage, at least as far as Sandwich Bay, where the mountains are now
covered with snow. We shall visit, this afternoon and evening, our last
iceberg, and mainly for some experiments with lights. The rocks here,
among which I saunter, are a kind of gallery tufted with wild grass and
herbage, up to which a few goats climb from the dwellings near our
vessel, and upon a patch of which I lounge and scribble. If there were
any spirit in me, the fine prospect, although somewhat familiar, would
awaken some fresh thoughts and feelings. One thought comes swelling up
from the sluggish depths—it is this: There is a fascination in these
northern seas, with their ices and their horrid shores. The arctic
voyagers feel and act under its impulse. I can understand their
readiness to return to polar scenes.
Late in the afternoon, sailing up the bay, after an ugly iceberg of no
particular shape or remarkable attraction. In New York Bay, it would be
thought a most splendid thing, and so indeed it would be; but here, in
contrast with the great berg of Belle Isle water, and many others, it is
a small matter, a harmless and dull specimen of its kind. Its merit is
its convenience. And yet, let me tell you, we pause in our approach at a
distance of seventy yards. I am not willing to go any nearer upon this,
the cliff side. The agent, Mr. Bendle, told us this morning, that when
he first came from England to these shores, he was fond of playing about
icebergs, and once rowed a boat under a lofty arch, passing quite
through the berg, a thing that he could not now be persuaded to attempt.
The wind blows rather strongly, and we lie to the leeward of the ice,
rolling quite too much for painting. There is no accounting for these
currents which flow in upon, and flow away from these bergs. The
submarine ice so interferes with the upper and lower streams that the
surface water rolls and whirls in a manner upon which you cannot
calculate. Under the leeward here, one would naturally suppose that the
current would set toward the ice, and require an effort on our part to
keep away. The contrary is the case. Two good oars are busy in order to
hold us up to our present position. The wind and the swell increase, and
so we make sail and scud to some small islands distant half a mile. We
moor our boat under the shelter of the rocks and clamber up, look around
upon the ruins washed and rusty, and take a run.
At seven o’clock I sit down on the warm side of a crag, and look about
with the intention of seeing what there is worth looking at in a spot to
which one might flee who was tired of seeing too much. Upon the word of
a quiet man, I find myself in the very middle of the beautiful, and
ought to be thankful that we are here, and wish that we might be
suffered to come again. And what is there here? Wise men have written
volumes over less. I do not know but here are groups of the South Sea
Isles in miniature. For example, separated from us by a narrow gulf of
water, and such clear, bright water, is an islet with a ridge, a kind of
half-moon crest, carpeted with olive-tinted moss, over which the lone
sun pours a stream of almost blinding light. What glory the God of
nature sheds upon these rugged outworks of the earth! The painter that
could faithfully repeat upon canvas this one effect of light would leave
Claude and Cole, and the like, far enough behind to be forgotten. The
wind is lulling; the sun touches and seems to burn the crest of the
island opposite, after eight o’clock. C—— is finishing a sketch; the
Captain and I have been hunting the sea-pigeons’ nests, a pair of which
keep flying off and on; and now the men are making the boat ready for
our twilight and evening play around “the ugly iceberg.” How glad the
poor little family of ducks must be, from whose home we have driven
them, that we are going away. They have been pretending to swim off, and
yet have managed to keep back near enough to watch us over the shoulder,
ever since we arrived. Timid, cunning fellows, how much they appear to
know! A stone disperses them, some to the wing and some to the bottom;
and now here they are again, all riding the same swell, and seeming to
swim away while they watch our motions, continually turning their slick,
black heads quickly over the shoulder.
If you would look upon the perfectly white and pure, see an iceberg
between you and the day’s last red heavens. If you would behold perfect
brilliancy, gaze at the crest of an iceberg cutting sharply into those
same red heavens. To all appearance it will burn and scintillate like a
crown of costly gems. In all its notched, zigzag and flowing outline, it
palpitates and glitters as if it were bordered with the very lightning.
He that watches the Andean clouds of a July sunset, and beholds them
rimmed, now with pink and rose-hues, and now with golden fire, will see
the edges of an iceberg when it stands against the sky glowing with the
yellow and orange blaze of sunset. We go to the skies for pure azure;
you will find it at twilight in these wonderful Greenland ices. I am
looking now upon what mimics the ruins of a tower, every block of which,
in one light, gleams like crystal; in another, as if they had been
quarried from the divinest sky. Cloud-like and smoke-like, they look
light as the cerulean air. This, as I have said already, is the effect
of perfect white seen through deep, transparent shadow. True azure is
the necessary result. More than enough, it would seem, has been said of
these forms and colors. But really the eye never wearies of these arctic
palaces so grandly corniced and pillared; these sculptures so
marvellously draped. As we gaze at them, even in this meagre and common
berg, under this delicate light veiled with the dusk of evening, they
are astonishing in their beauty. I look at them with joyful emotions,
with wonder and with love. Why do they not rustle with a silken, satin
rustle?
After dark, we sailed round to the northern extremity, where from the
lowness of the ice it was more safe to approach it, and dropped sail in
order to experiment with the blue lights furnished us by the governor.
Rowing up quite closely, within eight yards perhaps, C——, who stood
ready upon the bow, fired a couple. In the smoke and glare “we were a
ghastly crew,” while the berg was rather obscured than beautified. We
then rowed round to the side where the current was setting rapidly
towards the ice, and launched a flaming tar-barrel. With a stone for
ballast, it kept upright, and floated in fine style directly into the
face of the berg—an irregular cliff of sixty feet, pierced with
caverns. It was kept for some time under a succession of the brightest
flashes of pink light. Upon one slope of the swells the sheaf of red
flames gushing from the barrel would be turned from, on the other,
toward the ice. Thus the whole eastern front was kept changing from
light to darkness, from darkness to light. As the brightness was flung
back and forth from the sea to the berg, and from the berg to the sea,
the effect was exceedingly novel and beautiful. When the swells bore the
full-blown torch into a cave, and its ruddy tongues were licking the
green, glassy arches, we hoisted sail and went gaily bounding back to
harbor. For a while, the fire shot its fitful rays over the lonely
waters, and gleamed “like a star in the midst of the ocean.” At last it
was quenched in the distant gloom. A ghostly figure with dim outline was
all that was visible, and our work and play with icebergs were
over—over forever. It was midnight and past, when we dropped sails
alongside the vessel, after a quick run, enlivened, as we entered the
harbor, by a sudden display of the northern-light.