MOUNTAINS OF ICE
Among all the dangers and discomforts of seafaring life on the
Atlantic, there is nothing a captain so much dreads as contact with the
great mountains of ice that come floating down the Newfoundland coast
from the Arctic Ocean. Fog, rain, snow, and blizzards may be fought and
overpowered, but it is seldom that an ocean liner survives a collision
with an iceberg. Some of these encounters with the “Arctic travellers,”
as they are called, are most thrilling. Upon even the darkest night the
white apparel of these giant ghosts can be detected in time to avert
disaster; but when the fog is thick across the bows of the steamer,
then it is that the nerves of a captain and crew are tested.
One of the most appalling collisions with an iceberg was in May, 1876,
when off the coast of Labrador the _Caledonia_, with eighty-two souls
on board, came in contact with an unwelcome wanderer. Seventy-one of
the passengers and crew went down with the vessel under the shadow of
the berg. The remaining eleven converted their grim assailant into
a tower of refuge. For three days and three nights they lodged in a
crevice of the berg, keeping life in their bodies by eating a seal
which they killed, until they were ultimately rescued by the crew of a
fishing-boat that passed by on the morning of the fourth day.
An even more painful disaster occurred off Cape Race in the year 1885.
Seventy-four people were on board the _Vaillant_ when she left the
shores of Brittany on her way to Ste. Pierre, a small French possession
to the South of Newfoundland. All went well until Cape Race was
reached, when she crashed into an iceberg and sank in less than fifteen
minutes. Only twelve of the crew were able to save themselves from the
fate of the sixty-two who sank with the vessel. These twelve managed to
escape in two boats, but they were adrift on the ocean for over a week.
As they had neither time nor opportunity to save food or clothing from
the stricken vessel, some of them died of starvation, and their bodies
were eaten to sustain life in their comrades. It was bitterly cold, and
so their number soon became reduced to four. When these four survivors
were picked up, the frost had played such havoc with their hands and
feet that amputation was the only means of saving their lives.
The following account of a similar disaster in the Arctic seas is even
more thrilling than the above. It is from the pen of Mr. P. T. McGrath,
a Newfoundland journalist.
“In 1881 the Greely Expedition, sent into the Arctic regions by the
United States Government, established itself at Lady Franklin Bay
for a three years’ sojourn. Two years later the Newfoundland sealer
_Proteus_ was sent north with stores and supplies to be landed at Cape
Sabine, at the head of Melville Bay, for the use of the explorers when
they retreated to that spot. The ship, however, was pushed into the
ice in that bay by the orders of the inexperienced American officer
in charge of the expedition, and she was crushed so that she sank
within an hour, not an article aboard being saved, and the crew having
themselves to make a three-hundred-mile voyage in open boats to South
Greenland, where a collier picked them up and brought them home again.
When the explorers came south in October they found themselves faced
with the certainty of absolute starvation and the terrible prospect
that not a man in the party would escape the worst of deaths, for they
were marooned on a desolate Arctic headland, without shelter, food, or
firing, with not a human being for hundreds of miles, and absolutely
no hope of relief under the most favourable outlook for six or eight
months. It is impossible to give anything like an idea of the terrible
tortures these thirty-one humans endured during this desperate winter.
After they had consumed their scanty supplies which they brought
with them in their boats from the north, they had to maintain life
by means of shellfish caught with their naked hands along the shore,
and then to make an unpalatable yet acceptable mess of their sealskin
boots and garments, until at last, as the less robust of the party
died, the others kept themselves alive by the dreadful alternative of
cannibalism. When the two strongest of the Newfoundland seal fleet,
purchased by the American Government, and equipped at the cost of
$250,000, were pushed north the next spring, at a date earlier than
the Arctic Circle had ever been entered before, only six of the party
remained alive to tell the tale of a fight against death absolutely
unique in the records of marine adventure in any part of the known
world.”
During the year 1909 the icebergs off the Newfoundland coast were
more numerous than for many years previously. Some scientists have
attributed it to an icequake in the Arctic Regions, which broke up the
vast continent of ice there. The great boulders having gained their
freedom, they were brought down towards the south on the bosom of the
Arctic current. From Cabot Tower, on Signal Hill, near St. John’s, as
many as two hundred bergs were seen to pass by in a majestic procession
during one day, and this in the month of June. Lest it may be thought
that the air in St. John’s would be of a frigid nature during this
procession, it is only just to say that the weather was as charming
as June weather in England. It was at this time that the Allan liner
_Mongolian_ was jammed in the ice outside St. John’s Harbour for
several days, and the people of St. John’s, for the first time in fifty
years, saw the novel spectacle of passengers descending from the liner
and walking across the ice to the shore.
Another species of iceberg with which navigators have to contend is
the “growler,” a berg which just peers above the water, and carries
its greatest bulk below. Sometimes it is impossible to detect these,
however keen the lookout may be, until the captain experiences a bump
at the bow, and finds that an iron plate has been smashed in by the
force of the impact.