Page:The ocean and its wonders.djvu/204

 Greenland before his father, who followed him in the Fame. The following is his account of the circumstance:

"On my return to the ship, about eleven o'clock, the night was beautifully fine and the air quite mild. The atmosphere, in consequence of the warmth, being in a highly refractive state, a great many curious appearances were presented by the land and icebergs. The most extraordinary effect of this state of the atmosphere, however, was the distinct inverted image of a ship in the clear sky, over the middle of the large bay or inlet, the ship itself being entirely beyond the horizon. Appearances of this kind I have before noticed, but the peculiarities of this were the perfection of the image, and the great distance of the vessel that it represented. It was so extremely well defined, that, when examined with a telescope, I could distinguish every sail, the general 'rig of the ship' and its peculiar character; insomuch that I confidently pronounced it to be my father's ship the Fame, which it afterwards proved to be, though, on comparing notes with my father, I found that our relative positions at the time gave our distance from one another very nearly thirty miles, being about seventeen miles beyond the horizon, and some leagues beyond the line of direct vision."

Scoresby was, perhaps, one of the most persevering and intelligent observers of nature that ever went to the polar seas. His various accounts of