54 THE LAST CRUISE OF THE MIRAKDA. 



Greenland did I behold again such countless myriads of gulls. 

 This island is the farthest point out between Conception and 

 Trinity bays. By the afternoon the coast had become a dim 

 outline, and was soon lost to sight. We passed several mag- 

 nificent icebergs great, gleaming masses of ice, each of 

 which on land would have covered acres of ground. The 

 ship danced up and down, tossed by billows; but these 

 great icebergs, sinking as they do so far and deep into the sea, 

 are not moved by the motions of the surface, and the waves 

 dash against them as against a rocky coast, and fall back 

 again unheeded. The Arctic explorer Hayes says of icebergs : 

 "The iceberg is the largest independent floating body in the 

 universe except the heavenly orbs. There is nothing ap- 

 proaching it within the range of our knowledge on this globe 

 of ours ; and yet it is but a fragment of the ice-stream, which 

 in turn is but an arm of the great ice-sea. And yet the iceberg 

 is to the Greenland ice as the paring of a finger-nail to the 

 human body, as a small chip to the largest oak, as a shovel of 

 earth to Manhattan Island." This gives some faint idea 

 of the vast amount of ice in the frozen regions of the 

 Xorth ; the huge icebergs that passed us were but as little 

 chips floating away from the great body of ice they had left 

 behind. 



For the first two or three days after leaving St. Johns 

 we had fairly clear weather, and made good progress, and then 

 a dense fog fell upon us. Day after day we drifted about with- 

 out anybody knowing exactly where we were, for no accurate 

 observations could be taken. Sometimes the fog would lift 

 to reveal to us that we were surrounded by floe ice and ice- 

 bergs. For days we coasted along this ice in fog and rain, 

 attempting to find a passage through it. The long stretches of 

 ice, and the large icebergs towering like mountains above, and 

 the roaring of the waves dashing against the ice-floe,[com- 

 bined to make a scene both impressive and awful. The 



