108 
HEIGHT OF BERGS. 
ments of ice growth. Before us was an extended aiea 
of ice, rising by a regular talus till it cut against the sky, 
at the height of perhaps nine hundred feet. Its area, 
visible to the eye, measured rudely from two project- 
ing headlands, was about forty miles by ten in one 
unbroken sweep ; and its edges, where it entered the 
sea, were abrupt precipices, resembling the terrace- 
work of trap-rocks. 
The icebergs were very numerous : I counted two 
hundred and eight within the horizon ; and the in- 
shore or glacier face was quite choked with grounded 
masses, the more recent prod uct of this great manufac- 
tory. Mr. Griffin, who visited one of those impacted 
in the floe, estimated its height by the fall of a bullet 
and a seconds' watch at three hundred and eighty feet. 
This was, of course, only an approximation ; but the 
characteristic accuracy of the gentleman whose esti- 
mate it was, makes it certain that the altitude of this 
berg exceeded three hundred feet, a height which our 
subsequent observations proved to be of rare occurrence. 
Baffin's Bay is not only the most abundant source 
of icebergs known, but their magnitude here is great- 
er, probably, than any where else. The greatest alti- 
tude of antarctic ice mountains reported by Forster was 
"100 feet and upward." Graah's highest, on the east 
coast of Greenland, did not exceed 120 feet ; Scores- 
by's, in the Spitzbergen seas, 200 feet ; and Beechey's, 
in Magdalena Bay, not exceeding the same height ; 
while Sir John Ross measured one in this very bay 
of 825 feet in height by 1200 long. Our own greatest 
sextant measurement, with a floe serving for a base 
line, gave us 260 feet; but we met others much higher. 
One of these bergs presented a long inclined talus, 
which was evidently part of an original slope, unaltered 
