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A wide field of ice, or, it were better to say, a broad belt of bergs, lay between this stationary cloud and the schooner, though the existence of the vapour early caught Roswell's attention; and during the hour he was aloft, conning the craft through a very intricate and ticklish channel, not a minute passed that the young man did not turn a look towards that veiled spot.
While we were passing along the east shore of the island we saw a light on the opposite shore, a joyful sight, which Toyatte took for a fire in the Indian village, and steered for it. John stood in the bow, as guide through the bergs. Suddenly, we ran aground on a sand bar. Clearing this, and running back half a mile or so, we again stood for the light, which now shone brightly.
The ship at reduced speed dodged about, avoiding enormous bergs along her course, while far away on every hand glinted the shining high white sides of many more of the menacing ice mountains. Passengers photographed the brilliant monsters. The steamship Niagara, many leagues astern, reported a slight collision, with no great harm done. That was enough.
Before this brief conversation came to a close, Fred Ellice and Tom Singleton sprang up the companion, and stood on the deck gazing ahead with feelings of the deepest interest. Both youths were well read in the history of polar seas and regions; they were well acquainted, by name at least, with floes, and bergs, and hummocks of ice, but neither of them had seen such in reality.
During the night we had been drifting towards two large bergs, and about breakfast time we were becoming uncomfortably close to one of them the big floes were binding down on one another, but there seemed to be open water to the S.E., if we could work out in that direction.
We made progress in a fairly good direction this morning, but the outlook is bad again the ice seems to be closing. Again patience, we must go on steadily working through. We passed two immense bergs in the afternoon watch, the first of an irregular tabular form. The stratified surface had clearly faulted.
An opening of twenty or thirty yards would be found here and there, then a close pack that had to be opened by pushing the smaller bergs aside with poles.
A sandpiper on the shore, loons, ducks, gulls, and crows, a few of each, and a bald eagle are all the birds I have noticed thus far. The glacier is thundering gloriously. June 30. Clearing clouds and sunshine. In less than a minute I saw three large bergs born.
But the farther I went, the ice-pack, instead of showing inviting little open streaks here and there, became so much harder jammed that on some parts of the shore the bergs, drifting south with the tide, were shoving one another out of the water beyond high-tide line.
For three days the wind tore from off the sea into the open bight at whose head lay Togiak, and its violence wrecked the armour of shore ice in the bay till it beat and roared against the spit, a threshing maelstrom of shattered bergs.
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