112 
BERGS. 
Advance herself, though plated with iron as perhaps 
no other vessel has been, showed unequivocal marks 
of damage upon her sheathing. She was heeled over, 
and fortified with three additional strips of boiler iron, 
extending back from her cut- water to her beam. 
Our position was immediately opposite Duneira 
Bay, or, more exactly speaking, within it, at the dis- 
tance of perhaps twelve miles from the shore. The 
scenery was peculiar, wanting the sameness which 
generally characterizes an Arctic landscape, and the 
atmosphere so bright that we could see every wrinkle 
on the face of the hills. An immense glacier formed 
a parapet wall of white masonry at their feet. On the 
other side of us was what had been the sea, a ragged 
surface of ice, unbroken except by the black rivers 
which wound themselves among its ridges, and here 
and there by the pinnacle of a projecting iceberg. Be- 
yond came the varying horizon of icebergs ; and still 
further on, shaded towers and sunlit pyramids of ice 
penciled their fantastic outlines against the sky. The 
sun, at its midnight elevation of three degrees, bathed 
the whole hemisphere in the purple light of our Amer- 
ican sunset. 
The bergs were an interesting subject of study. I 
counted one morning no less than two hundred and 
ten of them from our decks, forming a beaded line from 
the N.N.W. to the S.S.E. It was, in fact, an investing 
chain of ice mountains, for the offsets from the glaciers 
completed an apparent circle. 
As we warped slowly along, I had an opportunity 
of partially measuring some of them. One, a magnif- 
icent specimen of ice architecture, was 195 feet high; 
another was, on its longest face, 310 fathoms, or 1860 
feet : its height was 140 feet ; and, reducing its mass 
