38 THE OCEAN. 



have lost at the price of most painful efforts, or have even been 

 obliged to abandon their enterprise completely. Such was the 

 case in the sea around Spitzbergen in 1777 ; ten Dutch vessels 

 were driven with tlie ice more than 1500 miles towards the south- 

 west, and shattered on the way. It was a phenomenon of the same 

 nature which prevented Captain Parry from reaching the North 

 Pole. He had already approached nearer to this point than all 

 preceding navigators, and had taken a sledge to cross the ice- 

 field ; but each day, notwithstanding the great distance appar- 

 ently traversed in the direction of the pole, he found himself further 

 than the day before from the goal towards which he marched. The 

 reason being that the continent of ice which bore him was being 

 itself carried rapidly towards the south. White bears are thus some- 

 times carried by ice-floes, and landed on the coasts of Lapland.* 



When once broken, the ice-field soon disappears ; large fragments 

 driven by the currents and the waves are dashed against each other 

 with the enormous force wliich a weight of hundreds of thousands or 

 millions of tons gives. Shattered by the terrible shock, these masses 

 are divided into pieces of smaller dimensions ; the cementing ice 

 being destroyed by the fragments of the more anciently-formed ice- 

 field, the turrets and pinnacles which stand here and there begin 

 to melt and fall, and a few days after the thaw has commenced 

 nothing remains but a few ice-floes and uneven blocks gently rocking 

 with the waves. To account for this rapid disappearance of the ice- 

 fields (in which the infinite tiny organisms f of the sea also aid) the 

 inhabitants of Greenland imagine that the entire mass is engulfed in 

 the depths of the ocean. Even in the Baltic, where this phenomenon is 

 comparatively much less remarkable, the Danish sailors, almost with- 

 out exception, assert that in spring-time the ice-floes are swallowed 

 up by the sea, although not one of them has witnessed the immersion. J 

 But what is more easily corroborated is the strange noise that always 

 accompanies the breaking up of the ice. With the crash of the meet- 

 ing ice, more deafening, more terrible than that of cannon answering 

 to each other, with the roar of the waves, and the groaning sound 

 from the breaking disks and the air which escapes from them, is 

 joined a kind of crackling, similar to drops of rain falling on plates 

 of metal. This noise, which is heard also on mountain glaciers, 



* Larto von Loweni^:!), MUfheilnr^rien von Peferma^w, Erganrangshcft xvi. 



t See below, the section entitled, EartJi and its Flora. 



X Forchhammer, Philosophical Transactions, part I., p. 233. 1865. 



