Afternoon by the Ice ij^ 



Ships caught in its edge will drift hundreds of miles into its middle 

 and sometimes perform all sorts of gyrations, crossing their own 

 paths before either breaking up and sinking or being spewed forth 

 again from its edge, sometimes at the opposite side of the world. 

 And when we say that it is not permanent, we mean the expression 

 to be taken in both of two quite different senses. 



First, the actual ice (or, say, any one cubic yard) of this raft is 

 constantly changing in a variety of ways, as it may melt away at 

 any time, while new volumes of water are continually freezing and 

 making more ice, and snow falls upon it and some of this becomes 

 congealed into the mass. There are some areas in the Ice-raft that 

 are, however, much older than the rest of it, and some of these ap- 

 pear to be very ancient. They are known as palaeocrystic islands 

 and they have become of great importance of late to our polar de- 

 fense system, because they are much more permanent and stable 

 than the rest of the raft and, being visually distinguishable, can be 

 mapped and make ideal airfields on which large supply bases and 

 permanent weather stations can be erected. Second, it now appears 

 very probable that the whole Arctic Ice-raft itself, as an entity, 

 may not be a permanent feature of our planet. In fact, up till five 

 hundred years ago there may not have been any such thing for some 

 thousand years. This possibility is of the utmost importance to a 

 proper understanding of the history of whaling as a whole, for it 

 may make it possible for us to explain some of that history's more 

 peculiar aspects. The reasons are as follows: 



There are many students of climatology who think that the 

 whole Arctic Ice-raft did so completely vanish about 700 a.d., at 

 the end of the cold period which brought on the so-called Dark 

 Ages in Europe, and that it then suddenly came back again about 

 the year 1450, when the first of a series of most terrible winters is 

 known to have descended upon Europe, and the temperature 

 dropped to a point from which it is only now recovering. One 

 climatologist — Professor C. E. P.. Brooks — further contends that 

 such change-overs can take place in one season, because once an 

 ice-raft has shrunk to a certain size, it can no longer either maintain 

 itself through the summer or grow at the edges. His theory is very 

 cogent, but to be explained it requires many more background facts 

 than can be assembled and presented here. Whether it is valid or 



