498 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
the ice; a practice which has been resorted to by whalers in 
extreme cases, as their only chance of escaping destruction. 
«While we were yet a few fathoms from the ice,” says Admiral 
Beechey, the eloquent eye-witness and narrator of the dreadful 
scene, “we searched with much anxiety for a place that was 
more open than the general line of the pack, but in vain; all 
parts appeared to be equally impenetrable, and to present one 
unbroken line of furious breakers, in which immense pieces of 
ice were heaving and subsiding with the waves. 
“ No language, I am convinced, can convey an adequate idea of 
the terrific grandeur of the effect now produced by the collision 
of the ice and the tempestuous ocean. Thesea violently agi- 
tated, and rolling its mountainous waves against an opposing 
body, is at all times a sublime and awful sight; but when, in 
addition, it encounters immense masses, which it has set in 
motion with a violence equal to its own, its effect is prodigiously 
increased. At one moment it bursts upon these icy fragments, 
and buries them many feet beneath its wave, and the next, as 
the buoyancy of the depressed body struggles for reascendency, 
the water rushes in foaming cataracts over its edges; whilst 
every individual mass, rocking and labouring in its bed, grinds 
against and contends with its opponent until one is either split 
with the shock or upheaved upon the surface of the other. Nor 
is this collision confined to one particular spot, it is going on as 
far as the sight can reach; and when, from this convulsive scene 
below, the eye is turned to the extraordinary appearance of the 
blink in the sky above, where the unnatural clearness of a calm 
and silvery atmosphere presents itself bounded by a dark hard 
line of stormy clouds, such as at this moment lowered over our 
masts, as if to mark the confines within which the efforts of 
man would be of no avail, the reader may imagine the sensation 
of awe which must accompany that of grandeur in the mind of 
the beholder. 
“ At this instant, when we were about to put the strength of 
our little vessel in competition with that of the great icy conti- 
nent, and when it seemed almost presumption to reckon on the 
possibility of her surviving the unequal conflict, it was gratify- 
ing in the extreme to observe in all our crew the greatest. calm- 
ness and resolution. If ever the fortitude of seamen was fairly 
tried, it was on this occasion ; and I will not conceal the pride I 
