Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/90

 base of measurement was three hundred and fifteen feet high, and a fraction over three quarters of a mile long. The natives told me that it had been grounded for two years. Being almost square-sided above the sea, the same shape must have extended beneath it; and since, by measurements made two days before, I had discovered that fresh-water ice floating in salt water has above the surface to below it the proportion of one to seven, this crystalized piece of Eric's Greenland had stranded in a depth of nearly half a mile. A rude estimate of this monster, made on the spot, gave me in cubical contents about twenty-seven thousand millions of feet, and in weight something like two thousand millions of tons. I leave the reader to calculate for himself its equivalent in dollars and cents, were it transported to the region of ice-creams and sherry-cobblers, and how much of it would be required to pay off the national debt, and how much more than half a century it would withstand the attacks of the whole civilized world upon it, for all those uses to which luxury-loving man puts the skimmings of the Boston ponds.

The tide at length carried off the ice which imprisoned us, and in the evening of the 22d we were again threading our way among the bergs and islands. Cape Shackleton and the Horse's Head lay off the starboard bow, and we were shaping our course for Melville Bay.