AMONG THE ICEBERGS. 



35 



clever little clay model of two men killing a sea-elephant, giving for it he being an 

 extravagant man one pound and a Lottie of rum. This pound was instantly offered to 

 the servants outside in exchange for another bottle." 



Crossing the Antarctic Circle, they were soon among the icebergs, keeping a sharp 

 look-out for Termination Land, which has been marked on charts as a 

 good stretch of coast seen by Wilkes, of the American expedition, thirty 

 years before. To make a long story short, Captain Nares, after a careful 

 search, un-discoverecl this discovery, finding no traces of the land. It was 

 probably a long stretch of ice, or possibly a mirage, which phenomenon 

 has deceived many a sailor before. John Ross once thought that he 

 had discovered some grand mountains in the Arctic regions, which he 

 named after the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Croker. Next 

 year Parry sailed over the site of the supposed range ; and the " Croker " 

 Mountains became a standing joke against Ross. 



Icebergs of enormous size were encountered ; several of three miles in 

 length and two hundred feet or more in height were seen one day, all 

 close together. But bergs of this calibre were exceptional; they were, 

 however, very often over half a mile in length. " There are few people 

 now alive," says the author we have recently quoted, " who have seen such 

 superb Antarctic iceberg scenery as we have. We are steaming towards the 

 supposed position of land, only some thirty miles distant, over a glass-like 

 sea, unruffled by a breath of wind; past great masses of ice, grouped so 

 close together in some cases as to form an unbroken wall of cliff several 

 miles in length. Then, as we pass within a few hundred yards, the 

 chain breaks up into two or three separate bergs, and one sees and 

 beautifully from the mast-head the blue sea and distant horizon between 

 perpendicular walls of glistening alabaster white, against which the long 

 swell dashes, rearing up in great blue-green heaps, falling back in a 

 torrent of rainbow-flashing spray, or goes roaring into the azure caverns, 

 followed immediately by a thundering thud,&s the compressed air within THE ACCUMULAT011 >> 

 buffets it back again in a torrent of seething white foam." Neither words 

 adequately describe the beauty of many of the icebergs seen. One had three high arched 

 caverns penetrating far to its interior; another had a large tunnel through which they could 

 see the horizon. The delicate colouring of these bergs is most lovely sweeps of azure blue 

 and pale sea-green with dazzling white; glittering, sparkling crystal merging into depths 

 of indigo blue; stalactite icicles hanging from the walls and roofs of cavernous openings. 

 The reader will imagine the beauty of the scene at sunrise and sunset, when as many as 

 eighty or ninety bergs were sometimes in sight. The sea was intensely green from the 

 presence of minute algae, through belts of which the vessel passed, while the sun, sinking 

 in a golden blaze, tipped and lighted up the ice and snow, making them sparkle as with 



* This is an apparatus consisting of a number of india-rubber bands suspended from the mast-head, during 

 dredging operations, which indicates, by its expansion and contraction, how the dredge is passing over the 

 inequalities of the bottom. 



