344 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 



must evidently have been very violent. Two or three sharp cracks were heard at the 

 time the ship was lifted, and a piece of plank, which proved to be part of the false keel, 

 was torn off and floated up by the bower, but no other serious injury was yet discovered. I 

 Our situation, however, was at this time as dangerous and painful as possible. Every 

 moment threatened us with shipwreck, while the raging of the storm, the heavy bewildering 

 fall of sleet and snow, and the circumstance of every man on board being wet to the skin, 

 rendered the prospect of our having to take refuge on the ice most distressing. We 

 remained in this state of anxiety and apprehension about two hours. On the one hand 

 we feared the calamity of shipwreck ; on the other, in case of her preservation, we looked 

 forward to immense difficulties before the ship, so firmly grounded, could be got afloat. 

 While I walked the deck under a variety of conflicting feelings, produced by the antici- 

 pation of probable events, I was suddenly aroused by another squeeze of the ice, indicated 

 by the cracking of the ship and the motion of the berg, which seemed to mark the moment 

 of destruction. But this renewed pressure, by a singular and striking Providence, was 

 the means of our preservation. The nip took the ship about the bows, where it was 

 received on a part rendered prodigiously strong by its arched form and the thickness of 

 the interior fortifications. It acted like the propulsion of a round body squeezed between 

 the fingers, driving the ship astern, and projecting her clear of all the ice fairly afloat 

 with a velocity equal to that of her first launching ! " 



The year 1830 was one of the most disastrous ever known in the navigation of the 

 northern seas, happily not for the loss of life, but of the ships employed in the whale 

 fishery. A group of vessels consisting of the St. Andrew of Aberdeen, the Baffin and 

 the Rattler of Leith, the Eliza Swan of Montrose, the Achilles of Dundee, and the Ville 

 de Dieppe from that port, while entangled with icebergs and floes, encountered a violent 

 gale, which drove in upon them the stupendous masses. On the evening of the 24th of 

 June, the ships were ranged in a line stem to stern, pressed on each side by the ice, when 

 the tempest arose that sealed their fate. In little more than a quarter of an hour, the 

 Baffin, Achilles, Ville de Dieppe, and Rattler were crushed into fragments by the huge 

 floes which the storm dashed against them, the noise of the ice rending asunder and 

 splintering their timbers, the falling of the masts, and the cries of the sailors compelled 

 to betake themselves to the frozen surfaces as their only refuge, forming a scene easier to 

 imagine than describe. Another frightful tempest on the 2nd of July, accompanied with 

 showers of hail and snow, accomplished in a similar manner the destruction of several of 

 their companions. " The dark and fearful aspect of the sky gave warning of approach- 

 ing danger. At seven in the morning a signal of distress was hoisted by the William of 

 Hull, and in a short time she appeared almost buried under masses of ice. About ten, 

 the North Briton was reduced to a complete wreck ; and at eleven the Gilder was in a 

 similar predicament. During six hours the storm slightly abated, but returning after 

 that interval with augmented fury, pressed the ice with additional force upon the Alex- 

 ander of Aberdeen and the Three Brothers of Dundee two fine vessels, so strongly 

 built that an observer might have supposed them capable of withstanding any shock 

 whatever. They made accordingly a very stout resistance. The conflict was dreadful, and 

 was beheld with awful interest by the sailors as they gazed around. At length their timbers 

 gave way at every point the sides bursting open, the masts crashing and falling with 

 an astounding noise : the hull of the Three Brothers was so much twisted, that the two 

 ends of the ship could scarcely be distinguished ; finally, only some broken masts and 

 booms appeared above the ice* The crews, spectators of this awful scene, gave three 

 cheers in honour of the gallant resistance made by their vessels to the overpowering 

 element by which they had been vanquished." This was a verification of one of Parry's 

 remarks, that a ship, even the strongest that can be built, becomes like an egg-shell when 



