Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 2.djvu/266

 For two days the weather was extremely unfavorable, the wind was southwest, and the Forward could make no way. From the 14th to the 16th the sea continued rough and stormy; but on the Monday a violent shower came, the result of which was an almost immediate calm. Shandon pointed out this peculiar phenomenon to the Doctor, who replied:

"It quite confirms the curious observations made by Scoresby, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which I have the honor to be a corresponding member. You see that during rain the waves are less susceptible to the action of the wind, even when violent. On the contrary, in dry weather, the sea is easily agitated by a comparatively slight breeze."

"But how do you account for this?"

"That is easily answered. I don't account for it at all," said the Doctor.

Just at that moment the ice-master, who was on watch at the mast-head, signaled a floating mass on the starboard side, about fifteen miles to leeward.

"An iceberg in these latitudes!" exclaimed the Doctor.

Shandon pointed his glass in the given direction, and confirmed the announcement of the pilot.

"That's strange!" said the Doctor.

"Does that astonish you?" asked the chief officer, smiling. "What! we are actually fortunate enough to find something that astonishes you!"

"Well, it astonishes me, and yet it doesn't," replied the Doctor, smiling, "for, in 1813, the brig Anne, of Poole, got blocked in among ice-fields in the forty-fourth degree of north latitude, and Dayement, her captain, counted icebergs by hundreds."

"Capital!" said Shandon; "you can still find something to tell us about it that we don't know."

"Oh! not very much," was the modest reply of the amiable little man, "except that icebergs have been met with in still lower latitudes."

"I know that, my dear Doctor, without your telling me, for when I was a cabin-boy aboard the Fly, a sloop-of-war"

"In 1818," interrupted the Doctor, "at the end of March or we might say April, you passed between two great