CHAPTER V. 



AMONG THE ICEBERGS. — DANGERS OF ARCTIC NAVIGATION. — A NARROW 

 ESCAPE FROM A CRUMBLING BERG. — MEASUREMENT OF AN ICEBERG. 



Upernavik is not less the limit of safe navigation 

 than the remotest boundary of civilized existence. 

 The real hardships of our career commenced before its 

 little white gabled church was fairly lost against the 

 dark hills behind it. A heavy line of icebergs was dis- 

 covered to lie across our course ; and, having no alter- 

 native, we shot in among them. Some of them proved 

 to be of enormous size, upwards of two hundred feet 

 in height and a mile long ; others were not larger 

 than the schooner. Their forms were as various as 

 their dimensions, from solid wall-sided masses of dead 

 whiteness, with waterfalls tumbling from them, to an 

 old weather-worn accumulation of gothic spires, whose 

 crystal peaks and sharp angles melted into the blue 

 sky. They seemed to be endless and numberless, and 

 so close together that at a little distance they ap- 

 peared to form upon the sea an unbroken canopy of 

 ice ; and when fairly in among them the horizon was 

 completely obliterated. Had we been in the centre 

 of the Black Forest, we could not have been more ab- 

 solutely cut off from u seeing daylight. 1 ' As the last 

 streak of the horizon faded from view between the 

 lofty bergs behind us, the steward (who was of a po- 

 etical turn of mind) came from the galley, and halting 



