Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/78



AMONG THE ICEBERGS.—DANGERS OF ARCTIC NAVIGATION.—A NARROW ESCAPE FROM A CRUMBLING BERG.—MEASUREMENT OF AN ICEBERG.

Upernavik is not less the limit of safe navigation than the remotest boundary of civilized existence. The real hardships of our career commenced before its little white gabled church was fairly lost against the dark hills behind it. A heavy line of icebergs was discovered to lie across our course; and, having no alternative, we shot in among them. Some of them proved to be of enormous size, upwards of two hundred feet in height and a mile long; others were not larger than the schooner. Their forms were as various as their dimensions, from solid wall-sided masses of dead whiteness, with waterfalls tumbling from them, to an old weather-worn accumulation of gothic spires, whose crystal peaks and sharp angles melted into the blue sky. They seemed to be endless and numberless, and so close together that at a little distance they appeared to form upon the sea an unbroken canopy of ice; and when fairly in among them the horizon was completely obliterated. Had we been in the centre of the Black Forest, we could not have been more absolutely cut off from "seeing daylight." As the last streak of the horizon faded from view between the lofty bergs behind us, the steward (who was of a poetical turn of mind) came from the galley, and halting