274 AURORA BOREALIS. [CHAP. XL. 



rate of nine miles an hour, and once in the night came within 

 less than a ship s length of a large berg. A naval officer on 

 board declared to me next morning that the peril had been im 

 minent ; that he had weathered a typhoon in the Chinese seas, 

 and would rather brave another than sail so fast in the night 

 through a pack of icebergs. He now thought it most probable 

 that the President steam-ship had been lost by striking a berg. 

 He reminded me that we had seen a pinnacle of ice, distant 100 

 yards or more from the main body of a berg, of which it was 

 evidently a part, the intervening submerged ice being concealed 

 under water. How easily, therefore, might we have struck 

 against similar hidden masses, where no such projecting pinnacle 

 remained to warn us of our danger. 



At half-past nine o clock on the evening of the 8th June, it 

 being bright moonlight, some hours after we had lost sight of the 

 ice, when we were in a latitude corresponding to the south of 

 France, we saw in the north a most brilliant exhibition of the 

 Aurora Borealis ; the sky seemed to open and close, emitting, 

 for a short period, silvery streams of light like comets tails, and 

 then a large space became overspread with a most delicate 

 roseate hue. The occurrence of this phenomenon in the summer 

 season, and in so southern a latitude, seemed to point to its con 

 nection with the ice which was drifting over the sea between us 

 and Newfoundland, now to the N. W. of us. We learn from 

 Sir James Ross s narrative of the late antarctic expedition, the 

 highly interesting fact, that when the Aurora Borealis was playing 

 over the great barrier of coast ice on the shores of the antarctic 

 land, it partook distinctly of the irregular and broken shape of 

 the icy cliffs over which it hovered.* 



June 12. A pilot came on board from Ireland, with English 

 newspapers, filled with debates on the repeal of the corn-laws. 

 Among the foreign news, a considerable space was occupied with 

 the affairs of France, Germany, Italy, India, China, and there 

 was only a short paragraph or two about America, North and 

 South. I had been traveling long enough in the New World to 

 sympathize fully with the feelings of some of my American fellow- 

 * Vol. ii. p. 221. 1842. 



