Miscellanea. 343 
wards upon an ice-floe in north latitude, along the shores of Newfoundland, 
by persons on board the ship Renovation, on the 21st of April, 1851, isa 
manifest proof of the deep interest which is still taken in the fate of Frank- 
lin and his crews. Some navigators considered that this appearance may 
have been a delusion, which might easily have operated on the mind’s eye 
of persons who for the first time saw a floating mass of ice. But I agree 
with naval friends who have looked into this case, that the evidence is too 
clear and circumstantial to allow us to doubt that the objects were vessels. 
We must also bear in mind that the tract to the south of St. John’s is pre- 
cisely that in which we know, from the excellent ice-chart of Mr. Redfield, 
such floating ice prevails, and occasionally in great quantities.* This author 
has demonstrated that very large masses of floating ice, sometimes miles 
long, not only abound where the Renovation was sailing, but extend to the 
south of the 40th degree of N. latitude ; occurring even in the Gulf-stream, 
and chiefly between 45° and 55° W. longitude. As to the position of these 
ships, we know, from the sketches of our Vice-President Sir G. Back, how 
a ship forced by the irresistible pressure of the ice high on the pack, and 
wedged there for four months, may be, as his ship the Terror was, on her 
beam ends one day, heaved out of water another, and upright, though a 
wreck, upon a third. Nor does it appear that any good reason can be given 
why a large field or floe in which ships had been frozen up should not have 
so broken up, after some years perhaps of congelation, on a great scale, that 
it might transport the vessels to vast distances, partly imbedded in, or firmly 
attached to, its rough and hummocky surface; as the keel of the Terror was 
on the occasion alluded to. Any one who has seen the condition of the 
surface of ice on the Russian lakes, or at the mouth of a great northern river, 
in the spring, can easily realize the idea that ships might just as easily be 
transported to considerable distances as the huge blocks of stones which 
such floes have been known to carry. It is the last-mentioned fact which 
has enabled the geologist to explain how, in former periods and when our 
lands were submerged, colossal blocks were wafted to vast distances from 
their parent rocks, and dropped to the bottom of a former sea when their ice- 
rafts melted. 
Granting that two ships were seen floating on ice, it is possible, say some 
persons, that they were the Hrebus and Terror, which had been abandoned 
loug ago in a far northern sea (the Polynia of the Arctic circle), and, if so, 
that their crews may have taken refuge on the nearest adjacent lands. In 
obedience to the drift, the floating ice may (they add), for aught that any 
one can gainsay, have made a coasting voyage unknown to man, by trending 
along a northern but undiscovered shore of Greenland, and then descending 
to Newfoundland in the great current which sets in between Greenland 
and Iceland. Or, taking a much more limited view, others suggest that 
the ice floe with its ships may simply have been dislodged from one of the 
* “ On the Drift Ice and Currents of the North Atlantic, with a chart 
showing the position of the ice at various times.”—American Journal of 
Science, vol. xlvii. p. 373. 
