340 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 



tinuing to increase, it became doubtful whether the ship would be able to sustain it; 

 every support threatened to give way, the beams in the hold began to bend, and the iron 

 tanks settled together. At this critical moment, when it seemed impossible for us to bear 

 the accumulating pressure much longer, the hull rose several feet ; while the ice, which 

 was more than six feet thick, broke against the sides, curling back on itself. The great 

 stress now fell upon our bow ; and, after being again lifted up, we were carried with 

 great violence towards the Alexander, which had hitherto been, in a great measure, 

 defended by the Isabella. Every effort to avoid their getting foul of each other failed ; 

 the ice-anchors and cables broke one after another ; and the sterns of the two ships came 

 so violently into contact, as to crush to pieces a boat that could not be removed in time. 

 The collision was tremendous, the anchors and chain-plates being broken, and nothing 

 less than the loss of the masts expected : but at this eventful instant, by the interposition 

 of Providence, the force of the ice seemed exhausted ; the two fields suddenly receded, 

 and we passed the Alexander with comparatively little damage. A clear channel soon 

 after opened, and we ran into a pool, thus escaping the immediate danger ; but the fall of 

 snow being very heavy, our situation still remained doubtful, nor could we conjecture 

 whether we were even yet in a place of safety. Neither the masters, the mates, nor those 

 men who had been all their lives in the Greenland service, had ever experienced such immi- 

 nent peril ; and they declared, that a common whaler must have been crushed to atoms." 

 Captain Scoresby relates a similar narrow escape from destruction owing to the same 

 cause. " In the year 1804," he observes, "I had an opportunity of witnessing the effects 

 produced by the lesser masses in motion. Passing between two fields of ice newly formed, 

 about a foot in thickness, they were observed rapidly to approach each other, and, before 

 our ship could pass the strait, they met with a velocity of three or four miles per hour. 

 The one overlaid the other, and presently covered many acres of surface. The ship 

 proving an obstacle to the course of the ice, it squeezed up on both sides, shaking her in 

 a dreadful manner, and producing a loud grinding or lengthened acute tremulous noise, 

 according as the degree of pressure was diminished or increased, until it had risen as high 

 as the deck. After about two hours the motion ceased, and soon afterwards the two 

 sheets of ice receded from each other nearly as rapidly as they had before advanced. The 

 ship in this case did not receive any injury ; but, had the ice been only half a foot thicker, 

 she might have been wrecked." Other navigators have not been so fortunate ; and the 

 annual loss of whaling vessels in the polar seas is considerable, the Dutch having had as 

 many as seventy-three sail of ships wrecked in one season. Between the years 1669 

 and 1778, both inclusive, or a period of 107 years, they sent to the Greenland fishery 

 14,167 ships, of which 561, or about four in the hundred, were lost. Every one will re- 

 member the intense and mournful interest occasioned by the loss of the President steamer, 

 which left New York in the year 1841 to cross the Atlantic to our shores, but perished in 

 the passage, without leaving a survivor to tell the story of her fate. It has been deemed 

 highly probable that this vessel got entangled in the ice, and was destroyed by collision 

 with its masses ; for during that year, in the month of April, the Great Western steamer 

 encountered a field extending upwards of a hundred miles in one direction, surrounded 

 with an immense number of floes and bergs, and had great difficulty in effecting its pas- 

 sage by this floating continent in safety. 



Another form under which the ice appears in the ocean is that of bergs, which differ 

 from the ice-fields in shape and origin. They are masses projecting to a great height 

 above the surface of the water, and have the appearance of chalk or marble cliffs and 

 mountains upon the deep. They have been seen with an elevation of two hundred feet 

 a circumference of two miles ; and it has been shown by experiments on the buoyancy 

 of ice floating in sea water, that the proportion above the surface is only about one- 



