J. Milne — Ice and Ice-work in Newfoundland, 405 



day after day and niglit after niglit this continues, and the crust 

 gi'ows thicker. A drift or fall of snow may help it in accumulating, 

 until it is at last from two to three feet in thickness. Stones of all 

 sizes, from pebbles to boulders, on which this coating may rest, are 

 now firmly set in "an icy maw " of ice, and are ready at the first 

 movement to cut and grind a path for themselves. The first calm 

 weather the sea freezes out from this to form an equivalent to the 

 " bay-ice " of the Greenland whalers. This, however, is only a 

 thin coating, which is either broken up or piled upon itself by the 

 first rough water coming from the " outside," or is driven off by 

 a land breeze. This generally goes on until some portion of the 

 Northern pack, coming south, meets with an adverse wind and 

 is driven ashore. When we reflect upon the immense mass con- 

 tained in one of these moving fields of ice, we can hardly conceive 

 the energy that is stored within it. Everything has to give way 

 before it, and the coast-ice, with its set of gravers firmly bedded 

 in its base, is pushed high and dry, sometimes as much as 100 yards, 

 back from high- water mark.^ It is in this way, by the coming in 

 of the Northern Pack, the rise and fall of the tide, and other causes, 

 that the land-ice is driven ashore, and many of the scratches and 

 grooves so common round the coast of Newfoundland have been 

 made. As a rule, these markings are remarkable for their definition. 

 Some of the scratches are so parallel, so long, and so like each other, 

 and even in their character from end to end, that at first sight their 

 origin might be doubted. Markings like these may be well seen in 

 the harbour of St. John's Island. The rock in which they are im- 

 pressed is a Calciferous Limestone, sloping gently seaward. It looks 

 as though it had been planed perfectly flat, and then a series of 

 parallel lines several yards in length, from three to six inches apart, 

 and from \iQi\ oi an inch in depth, had been evenly ruled across 

 the prepared surface. Sometimes, instead of these lines crossing an 

 even plane, similarly-marked smooth trough-like hollows have been 

 formed. These increasing in size in places give quite an undulating 

 character to the shore, as at the entrance to Terra Nova Eiver and 

 elsewhere. 



Such a piling up of ice by the driving in of the pack, whether it 

 be inland or ashore, is amongst the sealers termed '' raftering." At 

 a certain distance out from land, where the pack-ice can float, it 

 breaks off from that which is cemented to the shore. This latter, 

 no matter how it may have been formed, whether by spray or piled- 

 up pack-ice, goes under the general name of "balacada." It has 

 been suggested to me that this term, like many Newfoundland 

 names, may have its origin from the Spanish, it being a corrupted 

 form of '' barricade," a name very suggestive of the appearance 

 and conditions it is intended to describe. The edge of the " bala- 

 cada" is termed the "drain," which may average a depth of 

 about four fathoms, up and down, while through the agency of 



^ In the selection of Arctic papers for the Arctic Expedition of 1875, puhlished 

 hy the Royal and Eoyal Geographical Societies, p. 49, Robert Brown speaks of 

 sheet-ice and boulders during storms being driven and packed to a height of 50 feet. 



