52 
THE MIDDLE ICE, 
we first fell in with the ice. It was ofFHaroe Island, 
and consisted probably of a tongue or process from 
the main pack I have just described. Such interrup- 
tions are not uncommon earlier in the season, and the 
whalers sometimes avoid them by passing to the in- 
ner or inshore side of the island. We learned after- 
ward to regard such ice as hardly worthy of note ; hut 
as this was the first time we had met it, I have thought 
it best to quote literally from my journal. 
'’‘■Julij 1. This morning was called on deck at 4 A.M. 
by our commander. 
“About two hundred yards to the windwmrd, form- 
ing a lee-shore, was a vast plane of undulating ice, in 
nowise differing from that which we see in the Dela- 
ware when mid-winter is contending with the ice- 
boats. There was the same crackling, and grinding, 
and splashing, but the indefinite extent — an ocean in- 
stead of a river — multiplied it to a din unspeakable ; 
and with it came a strange undertone accompaniment, 
a not discordant drone. This was the floe ice ; per- 
. haps a tongue from the ‘ Great Pack,’ through which 
we are now every day expecting to force our way. A 
great number of bergs, of shapes the most simple and 
most complicated, of colors blue, white, and earth- 
stained, were tangled in this floating field. Such, 
how'-ever, was the inertia of the huge masses, that the 
sheet ice piled itself up about them as on fixed rocks. 
“The sea immediately around, saving the ground- 
swell, was smooth as a mill-pond ; but it wms studded 
over with dark, protruding little globules, about the 
size of hens’ eggs, producing an effect like the dimples 
of so many overgrown rain-drops fallen on the water. 
These, as I afterward found, were rounded fragments 
of transparent and fresh- water ice, the debris and de- 
