64 
REFRACTION. 
Our American birth-day, the 4th of July, could not 
pass us without at least a festive effort ; so we tap- 
ped a bottle of Heidsiek in the cabin, and all hands 
spliced the main-brace. But the day was neverthe- 
less a busy one. What little wind we had was near- 
ly dead ahead, though we managed to work along the 
open water, making “the pack” and the shore by al- 
ternate “tacks.” At 8 A.M. it fell calm, leaving us 
entangled among fragments of heavy floe. We got 
the brig’s head to the eastward with difficulty, and, in 
the midst of a dense fog, fired our blunderbuss and 
hove to for the “Eescue,” no objects being visible 
more than a half ship’s length from the decks. 
The fog left us about mid-day, and tbe atmosphere 
was so clear in the afternoon, that the land, although 
thirty miles off, was seen distinctly. The water and 
the sky, in somewhat anomalous contrast with this ex- 
tremely pellucid state of air, had a pearly or ash-colored 
tinting, and the floe ice, of which large quantities were 
around us, varied like the shadows of a daguerreotype. 
Toward 14 P.M. the temperature of the water fell 
to 30°, while that of the air rose to 36° and 37°. Look- 
ing toward the shore, I observed a sort of sbimmering, 
as of the heated air above a stove, and, at the same 
time, the base of the hills assumed a columnar char- 
acter, as marked as in the basalts of Staffa. Soon aft- 
erward, the entire land came up to us through a high- 
ly refractive medium, and the vertical arrangement 
which had displayed itself before in columns was 
broken into waving curves, the parallelism of their 
lines remaining unchanged. As the sun reached his 
greatest meridional depression, this was accompanied 
by an extreme distortion. The homogeneous charac- 
ter of the atmosphere was singularly disturbed. It 
