Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/48

44 allowing for exaggeration due to difficulty in gauging their length, bergs of several miles in length, up to 20 or 30, certainly do occur. A single glance at the ice chart for the Antarctic Regions published by the Admiralty will confirm this statement. On board the Balæna and the Scotia we saw many bergs at least 4 miles long: on one occasion, on the Balæna, we measured a berg 12 miles long, and on another occasion the Balæna steamed at the rate of 5 knots for 6 hours along the face of a berg, which made the length of it fully 30 miles. Some bergs have been recorded of very much greater height than any I have seen, though the records are doubted by some Antarctic explorers of recent years, but in bad weather and in those tempestuous seas it is easy for such errors to occur, though it may be possible to have bergs considerably more than 150 feet high in the Antarctic if, by weathering, one of these flat-topped bergs should become tilted up on end. These gigantic bergs have at times been described as ice islands, and by the inexperienced mistaken for land.

There is another class of icebergs in the Antarctic Regions that are rather overlooked and lost sight of by being overshadowed with so large a number of these great flat-topped bergs: these are bergs that are similar in