290 THE NORTHERN SEAS. 



Seine. Imagine tliat mountain, seen in perspective by tlie gay promen- 

 aders of the liois do Boulogne, a mass of liard and compact ice, and some 

 faint conception may be formed of these floating giants, which descend 

 Davis Strait toward Newfoundland and the United States. I say this ice 

 is hard and compact. La Eeiue Hortense tried cannon balls upon some 

 of the impudent little bergs, which paraded before her, without in the 

 least disturbing their promenade. Just as in ghostly legends a spectre, 

 shot through the heart, says coolly to his trembling auta|;onist "Fire 

 away." 



The expedition set the good example of throwing into the sea blocks 

 of wood, w ith a hole in them, containing a vial with a paper inclosed, 

 on which was recorded the date and the geographical position of the 

 place where the bottle was dropped. Several of these indicators have 

 been picked up and transmitted to the French admiralty, with the date 

 and place of their landing. To test the current flowing toward the east 

 and passing along Siberia, a number of these bottles should be thrown 

 into the strait which, eastward of the White Sea, divides the continent 

 from Nova Zembla, and they will reappear in Behring's Strait, w^here it 

 has been said whales have been caught still carrying the harpoons with 

 which they had been pierced in the Spitzbergen Seas. 



The expedition has proved by unanimous testimony the deterioration 

 of the climate of Greenland, Iceland, and Spitzbergen. In Greenland, 

 at a short distance from the shore', there is now only one immense 

 glacier, like those of the Alps. Mountains and valleys have disappeared 

 under the level of snow and ice, and the astronomers of Mars and 

 Venus, who draw or photograph our i)lanet, must be astonished by this 

 superabundance of arctic snow, which never melts, even when that of 

 Russia, Siberia, and Canada has disappeared in the rays of the summer 

 sun. 



The " fast" ice which to-day surrounds the island of Jan Mayen, half 

 way between Iceland and Spitzbergen, renders inaccessible the east 

 coast of Greenland, and sometimes extends to the north coast of Ice- 

 land, a circumstance which never happened in former times. Whalers 

 no longer go to Spitzbergen, whose seas are as depopulated as its plains, 

 where "the snow has ceased to melt. What is the cause of an effect so 

 disastrous, which threatens at some future time, more or less remote, 

 to drive from Iceland the starving population of about sixty thousand 

 inhabitants, which it feeds to-day, or rather does not feed, since it is by 

 lisliing that the Icelanders mostly obtain the insuflicient nutriment by 

 which they are barely sustained, even with the assistance of the Danish 

 government ! If the fast ice should inclose Iceland, as it has the island 

 of Jan Mayen, what would become of the Icelanders ? 



Hypotheses have not been wanting to explain this deterioration of the 

 climate of Greenland, now buried under a compact mass of ice and 

 snow, fifteen or sixteen hundred feet in depth. It has been generally 

 observed that the shores of the Baltic, of Scandinavia, Iceland, and 

 Greenland, are rising. In one of the bays of the latter country, the ex- 

 pedition found water- worn pebbles at an elevation never attained by 

 the present sea. The ancient banks of the Norwegian shore are in some 

 localities three hundred feet high. It has been supposed that the rising 

 of the bottom of the sea may have arrested the ice descending from the 

 north, and caused the present accumulation between Iceland and Green- 

 land. This hypothesis, I think, is not admissible. The belt of ice bor- 

 dering Greenland does not, in the least, resemble the masses of ice wiiich 

 the winds and currents sometimes accumulate in the gulfs of the jwlar 

 Beas. I think the true cause of the deterioration of the climate of the 



