In the Sea of Ice.
We appreciated the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the
ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided
with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and
stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound,
copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped--Alpine-stock and
all,--and equal to any emergency.
Certainly it rains whenever it feels like it in Alaska. It can rain
heavily for days together, and does so from time to time. The
excursion-boat may run out of one predicament into another, and the
whole voyage be a series of dismal disappointments; but this is not to
be feared. The chances are in favor of a round of sunshiny days and
cloudless nights as bright as the winter days in New England; of the
fairest of fair weather; bracing breezes tempered by the fragrant
forests that mantle each of the ten thousand islands; cool nights in
midsummer, when a blanket is welcome in one's bunk; a touch of a fog now
and again, generally lasting but a few hours, and welcome, also, by way
of change. As for myself, a rubber coat protected me in the few showers
to which we were exposed, and afforded warmth enough in the coldest
weather we encountered. For a climb over a glacier, the very thickest
shoes are absolutely necessary; beyond these, all else seems superfluous
to me, and the superfluous is the chief burden of travel.
We were gathered about the deck in little groups. The unpremeditated
coteries which naturally spring into existence on shipboard hailed one
another across decks, from the captain's cabin--a favorite resort--or
the smoking-room, as we sighted objects of interest. With us there was
no antagonism, albeit we numbered a full hundred, and for three weeks
were confined to pretty close quarters. Passing the hours thus, and
felicitating ourselves upon the complete success of the voyage, we were
in the happiest humor, and amiably awaited our next experience.
Presently we ran under a wooded height that shut off the base of a great
snow-capped mountain. The peak was celestial in its beauty,--a wraith
dimly outlined upon the diaphanous sky, of which it seemed a more
palpable part. When we had rounded this point we came face to face with
a glacier. We saw at a glance the length and the breadth of it as it
plowed slowly down between lofty rock-ridges to within a mile and a half
of the shore. This was our first sight of one of those omnipotent
architects of nature, and we watched it with a thrill of awe.
Picture to yourself a vast river, two or three miles in breadth, pouring
down from the eminence of an icy peak thirty miles away,--a river fed by
numerous lateral tributaries that flow in from every declivity. Imagine
this river lashed to a fury and covered from end to end, fathoms deep,
with foam, and then the whole suddenly frozen and fixed for
evermore--that is your glacier. Sometimes the surface is stained with
the _debris_ of the mountain; sometimes the bluish-green tinge of the
ancient ice crops out. Generally the surface is as white as down and
very fair to look upon; for at a distance--we were about eight miles
from the lower edge of it--the eye detects no flaw. It might be a
torrent of milk and honey. It might almost be compared in its
immaculate beauty to one of the rivers of Paradise that flow hard by
the throne of God. It seems to be moving in majesty, and yet is
stationary, or nearly so; for we might sit by its frozen shore and grow
gray with watching, and ever our dull eyes could detect no change in a
ripple of it. A river of Paradise, indeed, escaped from the gardens of
the blessed; but, overcome by the squalor of this little globe, it has
stopped short and turned to ice in its alabaster bed.
One evening, about 8.30 o'clock, the sun still high above the western
mountain range, we found ourselves opposite the Davidson glacier. It
passes out of a broad ravine and spreads fanlike upon the shore under
the neighboring cliffs. It is three miles in breadth along the front,
and is twelve hundred feet in height when it begins to crumble and slope
toward the shore. A terminal moraine, a mile and a half in depth,
separates it from the sea. A forest, or the remnant of a forest, stands
between it and the water it is slowly but surely approaching. The fate
of this solemn wood is sealed. Anon the mightiest among these mighty
trees will fall like grain before the sickle of the reaper.
We are very near this glacier. We see all the wrinkles and fissures and
the deep discolorations. We see how the monstrous mass winds in and out
between the mountains, and crowds them on every side, and rubs their
skin off in spots, and leaves grooved lines, like high-water marks,
along the face of the cliffs; how it gathers as it goes, and grinds to
powder and to paste whatever comes within its reach, growing worse and
worse, and greedier and more rapacious as it creeps down into the
lowlands; so that when it reaches the sea, where it must end its course
and dissolve away, it will have covered itself with slime and confusion.
It will have left ruin and desolation in its track, but it will likewise
have cleft out a valley with walls polished like brass and a floor as
smooth as marble,--one that will be utilized in after ages, when it has
carpeted itself with green and tapestried its walls with vines. Surely
no other power on earth could have done the job so neatly.
One sees this work in process and in fresh completion in Alaska. The
bald islet yonder, with a surface as smooth as glass and with delicate
tracery along its polished sides--tracery that looks like etching upon
glass,--was modelled by glaciers not so many years ago: within the
century, some of them, perhaps. A glacier--probably the very glacier we
are seeking--follows this track and grinds them all into shape. Every
angle of action--of motion, shall I say?--is indelibly impressed upon
each and every rock here about; so all these northlands, from sea to
sea, the world over, have been laboriously licked into shape by the
irresistible tide of ice. Verily, the mills of the gods grind slowly,
but what a grist they grind!
Let me record an episode that occasioned no little excitement among the
passengers and crew of the _Ancon_. While we were picking our way among
the floating ice--and at a pretty good jog, too,--a dark body was seen
to fall from an open port, forward, into the sea. There was a splash and
a shriek as it passed directly under the wheel and disappeared in the
foam astern. "Man overboard!" was the cry that rang through the ship,
while we all rushed breathlessly to the after-rail. Among the seething
waters in our wake, we saw a head appearing and disappearing, and
growing smaller and smaller all the while, though the swimmer was
struggling bravely to hold his own. In a moment the engines were
stopped; and then--an after-thought--we made as sharp a turn as
possible, hoping to lessen the distance between us, while a boat was
being manned and lowered for the rescue. We feared that it was the cook,
who was running a fair chance of being drowned or chilled to death. His
black head bobbed like a burnt cork on the crest of the waves; and,
though we marked a snow-white circle in the sea, we seemed to get no
nearer the strong swimmer in his agony; and all at once we saw him turn,
as in desperation or despair, and make for one of the little rocky
islets that were lying at no great distance. Evidently he believed
himself deserted, and was about to seek this desolate rock in the hope
of prolonging existence.
By this time we had come to a dead halt, and a prolonged silence
followed. Our sailor boys pulled lustily at the oars; yet the little
boat seemed to crawl through yawning waves, and, as usual, every moment
was an hour of terrible suspense. Then the captain, the most anxious
among us all, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted: "Here, Pete, old
boy! Here, Pete, you black rascal!" At the sound of his voice the
swimmer suddenly turned and struck out for the ship with an enthusiasm
that was actually ludicrous. We roared with laughter--we could not help
it; for when the boat had pulled up to the almost water-logged swimmer,
and he began to climb in with an energy that imperiled the safety of the
crew, we saw that the black rascal in question was none other than Pete
Bruin, Captain Carroll's pet bear. He shook himself and drenched the
oarsmen, who were trying to get him back to the ship; for he was half
frantic with delight, and it was pretty close quarters--a small boat in
a chop sea dotted with lumpy ice; and a frantic bear puffing and blowing
as he shambled bear-fashion from the stem to stern, and raised his voice
at intervals in a kind of hoarse "hooray," that depressed rather than
cheered his companions. It was ticklish business getting the boat and
its lively crew back to the davits in safety.
It was still more ticklish receiving the shaggy hero on deck; for he
gave one wild bound and alighted in the midst of a group of terrified
ladies and scattered the rest of us in dismay. But it was side-splitting
when the little fellow, seeing an open door, made a sudden break for
it, and plunged into the berth of a shy damsel, who, put to ignominious
flight in the first gust of the panic, had sought safety in her
state-room only to be singled out for the recipient of the rascal's
special attentions. She was rescued by the bravest of the brave; but
Bruin had to be dragged from behind the lace curtains with a lasso, and
then he brought some shreds of lace with him as a trophy. He was more
popular than ever after this little adventure, and many an hour we spent
in recounting to one another the varied emotions awakened by the
episode.
Heading for Glacier Bay, we found a flood of bitter cold water so filled
with floating ice that it was quite impossible to avoid frequent
collisions with masses of more or less magnitude. There was an almost
continual thumping along the ship's side as the paddle struck heavily
the ice fragments which we found littering the frozen sea. There was
also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea
to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack
in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of
the spectacle we were about to witness.
Thus we pushed forward bravely toward an ice-wall that stretched across
the top of the bay from one high shore to the other. This wall of ice, a
precipitous bluff or palisade, is computed to be from two hundred to
five hundred feet in height. It is certainly nowhere less than two
hundred, but most of it far nearer five hundred feet above sea level,
rising directly out of it, overhanging it, and chilling the air
perceptibly. Picking our path to within a safe distance of the glacier,
we cast anchor and were free to go our ways for a whole glorious day.
According to Professor John Muir--for whom the glacier is deservedly
named,--the ice-wall measures three miles across the front; ten miles
farther back it is ten miles in breadth. Sixteen tributary glaciers
unite to form the one.
Professor Muir, accompanied by the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell,
visited it in 1879. They were the first white men to explore this
region, and they went thither by canoe. Muir, with blankets strapped to
his back and his pockets stuffed with hard-tack, spent days in rapturous
speculation. Of all glacial theorists he is doubtless the most
self-sacrificing and enthusiastic. I believe, as yet, no one has timed
this glacier. It is dissolving away more rapidly than it travels; so
that although it is always advancing, it seems in reality to be
retreating.
Within the memory of the last three generations the Muir glacier filled
the bay for miles below our anchorage; and while it recedes, it is
creeping slowly down, scalping the mountains, grinding all the sharp
edges into powder or leaving a polished surface behind it. It gathers
rock dust and the wreck of every living thing, and mixes them up with
snow and ice. These congeal again, or are compressed into soft, filthy
monumental masses, waiting their turn to topple into the waves at last.
The wash of the sea undermines the glacier; the sharp sunbeams blast it.
It is forever sinking, settling, crushing in upon itself and splitting
from end to end, with fearful and prolonged intestinal reverberations,
that remind one of battle thunders and murder and sudden death. There
was hardly a moment during the day free from rumble or a crash or a
splash.
The front elevation might almost be compared to Niagara Falls in winter;
but here is a spectacular effect not often visible at Niagara. At
intervals huge fragments of the ice cliffs fall, carrying with them
torrents of snow and slush. Heaven only knows know many hundred thousand
tons of this _debris_ plunged into the sea under our very eyes. Nor was
it all _debris_: there were masses of solid ice so lustrous they looked
like gigantic emeralds or sapphires, and these were fifty or even a
hundred times the size of our ship. When they fell they seemed to
descend with the utmost deliberation; for they fell a much greater
distance than we could realize, as their bulk was beyond conception, so
that a fall of two hundred or three hundred feet seemed not a tenth part
of that distance.
With this deliberate descent, as if they floated down, they also gave an
impression of vast weight and when they struck the sea, the foam flew
two-thirds of the way up the cliff--a fountain three hundred feet in
height and of monstrous volume. Then after a long time--a very long time
it seemed to us--the ice would rise slowly from the deep and climb the
face of the cliff as if it were about to take its old place again; but
it sank and rose, until it had found its level, when it joined the long
procession drifting southward to warmer waves and dissolution.
In the meantime the ground swell that followed each submersion
resembled a tidal wave as it rolled down upon us and threatened to
engulf us. But the _Ancon_ rode like a duck--I can not consistently say
swan in this case,--and heaved to starboard and to larboard in
picturesque and thoroughly nautical fashion. Some of us were on shore,
wading in the mud and the slush, or climbing the steep bluffs that hem
in the glacier upon one side. Here it was convenient to glance over the
wide, wide snow-fields that seem to have been broken with colossal
harrows. It was even possible to venture out upon the ice ridges,
leaping the gaps that divided them in every direction. But at any moment
the crust might have broken and buried us from sight; and we found the
spectacle far more enjoyable when viewed from the deck of the steamer.
What is that glacier like? Well, just a little like the whitewashed
crater of an active volcano. At any rate, it is the glorious companion
piece to Kilauea in Hawaii. In these wonders of nature you behold the
extremes, fire and ice, having it all their own way, and a world of
adamant shall not prevail against them.