174 A summer's cruise to northern LABRADOR. 



points presented to the ice-current? If our slightly- 

 built vessel could navigate these ice-laden waters, lie 

 in harbors filled with ice, and not even have the paint 

 worn off her hull, how could she have escaped the least 

 of all the tremendous effects which are by some theorists 

 attributed to floating ice? Moreover, no bowlders or 

 gravel or mud were seen upon any of the cakes of floe- 

 ice, nor on any of the bergs, many of which were flat- 

 topped, like ordinary cakes of floe -ice. If they had 

 been thus laden, they had dropped all burdens of this 

 nature nearer their birthplace in Davis Strait, or the re- 

 gions farther north. The icebergs in nearly every case, 

 when closely observed, bore evidence of having been re- 

 peatedly overturned as they were borne along in the cur- 

 rent, often with old water-lines presenting different an- 

 gles to the present water-level. The floe-ice was hum- 

 mocky, which is a strong proof of its having come from 

 open straits in the polar regions, the cakes looking as if 

 they had been frozen and refrozen, jammed together, 

 and then piled atop of each other by currents and storms 

 long before their advent upon this coast. The only dis- 

 coloration noticed was probably caused by seals resting 

 upon and soiling the surface. It should however be 

 mentioned that one bowlder was said to have been seen 

 by a member of our party upon an iceberg off Cape 

 Webuc. 



Finally, as we shall see farther on, the few ice-marks 

 and grooves detected by myself and others on the Lab- 

 rador coast show plainly that the country was once cov- 

 ered by land-ice, that it filled the bays and fjords, and 

 moved into the sea at right angles to the course of the 

 Labrador current, which flows parallel to the shore 



