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Updated: May 4, 2025
Evidently these bergs are moving about in an irregular fashion, only they must have all travelled a little east in the forty-eight hours as we have done. Another interesting observation to-night is that of the slow passage of a stream of old heavy floes past the ship and the lighter ice in which she is held.
She was dazzled but fascinated, unconscious of heat and fear, for she had not seen or imagined a spectacle like this. "It's tremendous!" she said in an awed voice. "Pretty fierce," Jim agreed. "A bush-fire's a big thing, but it doesn't grip you like the break up of the ice. When the river bursts the jam, the floes grind the rocks smooth and rub out the pines.
The upper white blink referred to ice about six miles distant, being beyond the horizon; the narrow yellowish portions referred to floes and compact ice; the lowest yellow blink, which in brightness and colour resembled the moon, was the reflection of a field at the distance of thirty miles, to which, directed by the blink, we made way in the Baffin, through the channels of water represented in the sky by bluish-grey streaks.
The pictures which his imagination thus brought before him were startling and never to be forgotten. The first was that of an angry sea in the blue light of an arctic winter. Stars flecked the zenith and shed a pale lustre on the moving ice-floes hurrying toward a horizon of skurrying clouds and rising waves. On one of those floes stood a woman alone, with face set toward her death.
I think it is the first time I have known rain beyond the Antarctic circle it is interesting to speculate on its effect in melting the floes. We have scarcely moved all day, but bergs which have become quite old friends through the week are on the move, and one has approached and almost circled us.
We came through these making nearly 3 knots, but, alas! only in a direction which carried us a little east of south. It was difficult to get from one tract to another, but the tracts themselves were quite clear of ice. I noticed with rather a sinking that the floes on either side of us were assuming gigantic areas; one or two could not have been less than 2 or 3 miles across.
"That is true," remarked Pencroft, "and when I have been serving on board whalers I have seen icebergs off Cape Horn." "The severe cold experienced in Lincoln Island," said Gideon Spilett, "may then perhaps be explained by the presence of floes or icebergs comparatively near to Lincoln Island."
We should have seen the sea in front of us; or rather, an arm of the sea; for Finchampstead ridges opposite, instead of being covered with farms, and woodlands, and purple heath above, would have been steep cliffs of sand and clay, just like those you see at Bournemouth now; and what would have spoilt somewhat the beauty of the sight along the shores there would have floated, at least in winter, great blocks and floes of ice, such as you might have seen in the tideway at King's Lynn the winter before last, growling and crashing, grubbing and ploughing the sand, and the gravel, and the mud, and sweeping them away into seas towards the North, which are now all fruitful land.
Do they meet out there the counter floes from the Canada side, and then do they all join hands and sink at a given signal to the bottom? Certainly, there is nothing melting in the mood of the raw spring winds and clouded skies. 'What are your plans? asked old Fog, abruptly, one morning when the gulls had flown out to sea, and the fog came stealing up from the south. 'For what?
The team struggled and strained violently for a few seconds in their efforts to overcome the vis inertiæ of the sledge, and it seemed as if the traces would part; but they were made of tough walrus-hide, and held on bravely, while the heavy vehicle gradually fetched way, and at length flew over the floes at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour.
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