CHAPTER XXIX.

BELLE ISLE AND THE COAST.—AFTER-DINNER DISCUSSION.—FIRST VIEW OF LABRADOR.—ICEBERGS.—THE OCEAN AND THE SUNSET.

Wednesday,July 6. After a quiet night, with a mild and favorable breeze, the morning opens with the promise of a bright day. Our little cloud of sail is all up in the early sunshine, and moving before the cool south wind steadily forward down the northern sea. Brilliantly as the summer sun looks abroad upon the mighty waters, I walk the clean, wet deck, in the heaviest winter clothing, and have that pleasant tingling in the veins which one feels in a brisk walk on a frosty autumnal morning. We are abreast of South Belle Isle, high lands fronting the ocean, with huge precipices, the fashion of most of the eastern coast of Newfoundland. With all their sameness, their rugged grandeur and the ceaseless battle of the waves below make them ever interesting. Imagine the Palisades of the Hudson, and the steeper parts of the Highlands exposed to the open Atlantic, and you will have no imperfect picture of these shores. They have no great bank of earth and loose rocks heaped up along their base, but step at once into the great deep; so deep that the icebergs, several of which are in sight, float close in, and seem to dare their very crags.

Afternoon. We have a pleasant custom of coming up, after dinner, and eating nuts and fruits on deck. It is one of the merry seasons of the day, when John Bull and Jonathan are apt to meet in those pleasant encounters which bring up the past, and draw rather largely upon the future, of their history. John is always the greatest, of course, and ever will be,secula seculorum. Jonathan, “considering,” is greater than John. To be sure he is thinner, and eats his dinner in a minute; but then he has every thing to do, and the longest roads on earth to travel, in the shortest time. In fact, he has many of the roads to make, and the least help and the shortest purse of any fellow in the world that undertakes and completes grand things. John’s first thousand years is behind him; Jonathan’s, before him. One’s work is done; the other’s begun. John’s fine roads were made by his forefathers; Jonathan is the forefather himself, and is making roads for his posterity. In fact, Jonathan is a youth only, and John an old man. When the lad gets his growth, he will be everywhere, and the old fogy, by that time, comparatively nowhere. Jonathan insists that he is up earlier in the morning than John, and smarter, faster, and more ingenious. He contends that he has seen his worst days, and John his very best. The longer the diverging lines of the dispute continue, the further they get from any end; and wind up finally with one general outburst of rhetoric, distinguished for its noise, in which each springs up entirely conscious of a perfect victory. In the complicated enjoyment of almonds, figs, and victory, we betake ourselves to reading, the pencil and the brush.

PLATE No. 3.AN ARCHED ICEBERG IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHTLith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.

We are coasting along the extreme northern limb of Newfoundland, bound with its endless girdle of adamant, upon which the white lions of old Neptune are perpetually leaping, but which they will never wrench away. The snow lies in drifts along the heights, a novel, but rather dreary decoration for a summer landscape. Between us and the descending sun stands a berg, church-like in form. The blue shadows in contrast with the pure white, have a deep, cloud-like, and grand appearance. It is certainly a most superb thing, rising out of the blue-black waves, now gleaming in the slant sunlight like molten silver. So vast and varied is the scene, at this moment, that many pencils and many pens would fail to keep pace with the rapid description of the mind.

Directly west, is the Land’s End of Newfoundland, Cape Quirpon—in the seaman’s tongue, Carpoon, which we now shoot past. A few miles to the north, as if it might have been split off from the Cape, lies Belle Isle. The broad avenue of dark sea, extending westward between the cape and the island, opens out into the Strait of Belle Isle, and carries the eye to the shore of Labrador, our first view of that bony and starved hermit of a country. In this skeleton sketch, as it shows on paper, there is nothing very remarkable; but with the flesh and the apparel of nature upon it, it is more beautiful than language can paint to the reader’s eye. The entire east is curtained by one smooth cloud, of the hue called the ashes-of-roses. Full against it, an iceberg rises from the ocean, after the figure of a thunderhead, and of the color of a newly-blown rose of Damascus—a gorgeous spectacle. The waters have that dark violet, with a silvery surface, lucent like the face of a mirror, and a complexion in the deeps reminding one of the soft, dusky hues of a Claude Lorraine glass. The painter is busy with his colors, and all are silently opening mind and heart to the universal beauty. We move on over the lovely sea with a quiet gracefulness, in harmony with the visible scene and with our emotions. We are looking for unusual splendors, at the approaching sunset. I close the note-book, and give myself entirely to the enjoyment of the lonely and still magnificence.

The book is open to record. The sun on the rugged hills of Labrador, a golden dome; Belle Isle, a rocky, blue mass, with a wavy outline, rising from the purple main pricked with icebergs, some a pure white, others flaming in the resplendent sunset like red-hot metal. We are sailing quietly as an eagle on the still air. Our English friends are heard singing while they walk the deck, and look off upon the lonesome land where their home is waiting for them.

All that we anticipated of the sunset, or the after-sunset, is now present. The ocean with its waves of Tyrian dye laced with silver, the tinted bergs, the dark-blue inland hills and brown headlands underlie a sky of unutterable beauty. The west is all one paradise of colors. Surely, nature, if she follows as a mourner on the footsteps of the fall, also returns jubilant and glorious to the scenes of Eden. Here, between the white light of day and the dark of the true evening, shade and brightness, like Jacob and the angel, now meet and wrestle for the mastery. Close down along the gloomy purple of the rugged earth, beam the brightest lemon hues, soon deepening into the richest orange, with scattered tints of new straw, freshly blown lilacs, young peas, pearl and blue intermingled. Above are the royal draperies of the twilight skies. Clouds in silken threads and skeins; broad velvet belts and ample folds black as night, but pierced and steeped and edged with flaming gold, scarlet and crimson, crimson deep as blood; crimson fleeces, crimson deep as blood; plumes tinged with pink, and tipped with fire, white fire. And all this glory lies sleeping on the shore, only on the near shore of the great ethereal ocean, in the depths of which are melted and poured out ruby, sapphire and emerald, pearl and gold, with the living moist blue of human eyes. The painter gazes with speechless, loving wonder, and I whisper to myself: This is the pathway home to an immortality of bliss and beauty. Of all the days in the year, this may be the birth-day of the King-of-day, and this effulgence an imperial progress through the grand gate of the west. How the soul follows on in quiet joy, dreaming of lovely ones, waiting at home, and lovely ones departed, waiting with Christ! Here come those wondrous lines of Goethe, marching into the memory with glowing pomp:

. . . . “The setting Sun! He bends and sinks—the day is over-lived. Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life. Oh! that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after, forever after him! I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet,—every height on fire,—every vale in repose,—the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my god-like course. Already the sea, with its heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight. Yet the god seems at last to sink away. But the new impulse wakes. I hurry on to drink his everlasting light,—the day before me and the night behind,—the heavens above, and under me the waves. A glorious dream! as it is passing, he is gone.” . . . . .

Here come the last touches of the living coloring, tinging the purple waves around the vessel. Under the icebergs hang their pale and spectral images, piercing the depths with their mimic spires, and giving them a lustrous, aërial appearance. The wind is lulling, and we rise and fall gracefully on the rolling plain. “The day is fading into the later twilight, and the twilight into the solemn darkness.” No, not into darkness; for in these months, the faint flame flickering all night above the white ashes of day from the west circling around to the north and east, the moonlight and the starlight and the northern-light, all conspire to make the night, if not “more beloved than day,” at least very lovely. A gloomy duskiness drapes the cape, beneath the solitary cliffs of which lies half entombed a shattered iceberg, a ghostly wreck, around whose dead, white ruins the mad surf springs up and flings abroad its ghastly arms. Softly comes its sad moaning and blends with the plaintive melodies of the ocean. Hark! a sullen roar booms across the dusky sea—nature’s burial service and the funeral guns. A tower of the old iceberg of the cape has tumbled into the billows. We gather presently into the cabin for prayer, and so the first scene closes on the coast of Labrador.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE MIDNIGHT LOOK-OUT FORWARD.—A STORMY NIGHT.—THE COMEDY IN THE CABIN.

PastMidnight. I have been up and watching forward for more than an hour, roused from my berth by the cry of ice. A large ship, with a cloud of sail, passed just across our head, bound for Old England. “That’s a happy fellow,” says the man at the helm; “past the dangers of the St. Lawrence and the Straits, and fairly out to sea.” The wind is rising, and promises a rough time. “There is something,” I said to myself, as I leaned, and looked over the bow, “there is something in all this, familiar as it is to many, very grand and awful, as we rise upon the black seas, and plunge into the darkness, rushing on our gloomy, strange way. We seem to be above the very ‘blackness of darkness,’ and riding upon the bosom of the night. The sounding foam, sweeping forward from beneath our bows, looks like a cloud of supernatural brightness, its whiteness filled, as it is, with the fire and electric scintillations of the sea. One could easily imagine himself sailing on the breeze through the night, with sparks of lightning and a cloud at his vessel’s bow.” The wind freshens to a gale nearly, and all hands are called on deck. We are rolling in a most uncomfortable manner, and I have retreated to my cabin, and will creep back to my berth.

Thursday Noon,July 7. A few scrawls of the pencil will serve to give an outline of our experience for the last twelve hours. A dense fog, high wind and a heavy swell. As a matter of course, our little ship has been in great commotion, and we, miserably sea-sick, regardless of breakfast, absent from the cold, wet deck, and rolled up below, dull and speechless in bed. We have been gradually creeping up into the world, of late, sipping a little coffee and nibbling at crackers. We are off Cape St. Louis, the most eastern land of the continent. The few turns on deck have sufficiently electrified the brain to enable me to get on thus far with my notes, and to venture upon a short description of a cabin-scene, at a very late hour last night.

Three sides of our cabin, a room some ten feet by twelve, and barely six feet under the beams, are taken up by four roughly-made berths; one on each side, and two extending crosswise, with a space between them, fitted up with shelves, and used for the flour-barrel, and as a cupboard. Beneath the berths are trunks, tubs, bags, boxes and bundles, most of our choicest stores. From the centre, and close upon the steep, obtrusive stairs, covered with a glossy oil-cloth, of a cloudy brown and yellow, our table looks round placidly upon this domestic scene, so indicative of refreshment and repose. With this little sketch of our sea-apartment, the stage upon which was enacted our last night’s brief play, I will undertake its description, promising a brevity that rather suggests, than paints it.

After the midnight look-out forward for ice, and the retreat to the cabin, I soon joined in the general doze, rather suffered than enjoyed. In the uproar above, sharp voices and the rush of footsteps over the deck, occasionally stamping almost in our very faces, we were too frequently called back to full consciousness, to escape away into any thing better than the merest snatch of a dream. In my own case, the stomach, as usual, indulged itself in taking the measure of those motions, so disastrous to its peace and equipose; those rollings, risings, sinkings, divings, flings and swings, in which there is the sense of falling, and of vibrations smooth and oily. Where one’s mind’s eye is perpetually looking down in upon the poor remains of his late departed dinner, there is no possibility for the outer eye to sink into any true and honest slumber. The shut lid is a falsehood. It is not sleep. The live, wakeful eye is under it, looking up against the skinny veil. Occasionally the veil is lifted just to let the dark out; occasionally the dumb blackness falls in upon the retina like a stifling dust, and dims it, for a moment, to a doze. But the fire of wakefulness soon flashes up from the cells of the brain, and throws out the sleepy darkness, as the volcanic crater throws out its smoke and ashes.

Through some marine manœuvre, thought necessary by the master spirit on deck, and which could be explained by a single nautical word, if I only knew what the word is, we began to roll and plunge in a manner sufficiently violent and frightful to startle from its staid quiet almost every movable in the cabin. Out shot trunks and boxes—off slid cups and plates with a smash—back and forth, in one rough scramble with the luggage, trundled the table, followed by the nimble chairs. At this rate of going on, our valuables would soon mix in one common wreck. Determining to interfere, I sprang into the unruly confusion, and succeeded in lighting a candle just in time to join in the rough-and-tumble, at the risk of ribs and limbs, and the object of mingled merriment and alarm to the more prudent spectators. Botswood, an experienced voyager, shouted me back to my berth instantly, if I would not have my bones broken at the next heavy lurch of the vessel. I was beginning to feel the force of the counsel, when another roll, almost down upon the beam-ends, overturned the butter-tub and a box of loaf-sugar, and brought their contents loose upon the field of action. They divided themselves between the legs of the table and the individual, and so, candle in hand and adorned in modest white, he sat flat down upon the floor among them, at once their companion in trouble and their protector. The marble-white sugar and the yellow butter, our luxuries and indispensable necessaries, there they were, on the common floor, and disposed for once to join in a low frolic with plebeian boots and shoes and scullion trumpery. With an earnest resolve to prevent all improprieties of the kind, one hand grasped, knuckle deep, the golden mellow mass, of the size of a good Yankee pumpkin, and held on, while the other was busy in restoring, by the rapid handful, the sugar to the safety of its box. The candle, in the mean time, encouraged by the peals of laughter in the galleries, slid back and forth in the most trifling manner possible. When we tipped one way, then I sat on a steep hill-side, looking down toward the painter, roaring in his happy valley: away slid the candle in her tin slippers, and away the barefooted butter wanted to roll after, encouraged to indulge in the foolish caper by a saucy trunk jumping down from behind. When we tipped the other way, then I sat on the same hill-side, legs up, looking up, an unsatisfactory position: back slid the candle, followed by a charge of sharp-pointed baggage, and off started the butter with the best intentions toward the tub, waiting prostrate and with open arms. Notwithstanding the repetition and sameness of this performance, the beholders applauded with the same heartiness, as if each change back and forth was a novel and original exhibition. What heightened the effect of the scene, and gave it a suspicion of the tragic, was a keg of gunpowder, which evinced, by several demonstrations of discontent in the dark corner where it tumbled about, a disposition to come out and join the candle. By a happy lull, not unusual in the very midst of these cabin confusions during a brush at sea, the powder did not enter, and I was enabled to pitch the butter into the tub, and finally myself, after some few preliminaries with a towel, into my berth, where, in the course of the small remnant of the night, I fell into some broken slumbers.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE CAPE AND BAY OF ST. LOUIS.—THE ICEBERG.—CARIBOO ISLAND.—BATTLE HARBOR AND ISLAND.—THE ANCHORAGE.—THE MISSIONARIES.

Fiveo’clock, P. M. What a pleasing contrast! We have been tossing nearly all day upon a rough, inclement ocean, and are now on the sunny, smooth waters of the bay, gliding westward, with Cape St. Louis close upon our right. We have sailed from winter into summer, almost as suddenly as we come out of the fog, at times—bursting out of it into the clear air, as an eagle breaks out of a cloud. It is fairly a luxury to bask in this delicious sunshine, and smell the mingled perfume of flowers and the musky spruce. Mr. Hutchinson is filled with delight to find himself once more on this beautiful bay. The rocky hill-country along the western shores, nine or ten miles distant, is not the mainland, he tells us, but islands, separated from the mainland, and from each other, by narrow waters, occasionally expanding into lakes of great depth, and extending more than forty miles from the sea. Were these savage hills and cliffs beautified with verdure, and sprinkled with villages and dwellings, this would class among the finest bays of the world. Across it to the south, some seven miles, and partly out to sea, lies a cluster of picturesque islands, where is Battle Harbor, the home of the missionaries, and the principal port on the lengthy coast of Labrador.

A fine iceberg, of the fashion of a sea-shell, broken open to the afternoon sun, and unfolding great beauty, lies in the middle of the bay. We are sailing past it, on our passage to the harbor, just near enough for a good view. It gleams in the warm sun like highly-burnished steel, changing, as we pass it, into many complexions—changeable silks and the rarest china. The superlatives are the words that one involuntarily calls to his aid in the presence of an iceberg. From this bright creation floating in the purple water, I look up to the bright clouds floating in the blue air, and easily discover likenesses in their features, ways and colors.

The coast of Labrador is the edge of a vast solitude of rocky hills, split and blasted by the frosts, and beaten by the waves of the Atlantic, for unknown ages. Every form into which rocks can be washed and broken, is visible along its almost interminable shores. A grand headland, yellow, brown and black, in its horrid nakedness, is ever in sight, one to the north of you, one to the south. Here and there upon them are stripes and patches of pale green—mosses, lean grasses, and dwarf shrubbery. Occasionally, miles of precipice front the sea, in which the fancy may roughly shape all the structures of human art, castles, palaces and temples. Imagine an entire side of Broadway piled up solidly, one, two, three hundred feet in height, often more, and exposed to the charge of the great Atlantic rollers, rushing into the churches, halls, and spacious buildings, thundering through the doorways, dashing in at the windows, sweeping up the lofty fronts, twisting the very cornices with snowy spray, falling back in bright green scrolls and cascades of silvery foam. And yet, all this imagined, can never reach the sentiment of these precipices.

More frequent, though, than headlands and perpendicular sea-fronts are the sea-slopes, often bald, tame, and wearisome to the eye, now and then the perfection of all that is picturesque and rough, a precipice gone to pieces, its softer portions dissolved down to its roots, its flinty bones left standing, a savage scene that scares away all thoughts of order and design in nature. If I am not mistaken, there are times when a slope of the kind, a mile or more in length, and in places some hundreds of feet in breadth from the tide up to the highest line of washing, is one of the most terribly beautiful of ocean sights. In an easterly gale, the billows roll up out of the level of the ocean, and wreck themselves upon these crags, rushing back through gulfs and chasms in a way at once awfully brilliant and terrific.

This is the rosy time of Labrador. The blue interior hills, and the stony vales that wind up among them from the sea, have a summer-like and pleasant air. I find myself peopling these regions, and dotting their hills, valleys, and wild shores with human habitations. A second thought, and a mournful one it is, tells me that no men toil in the fields away there; no women keep the house off there; there no children play by the brooks, or shout around the country school-house; no bees come home to the hive; no smoke curls from the farm-house chimney; no orchard blooms; no bleating sheep fleck the mountain-sides with whiteness; and no heifer lows in the twilight. There is nobody there; there never was but a miserable and scattered few, and there never will be. It is a great and terrible wilderness of a thousand miles, and lonesome to the very wild animals and birds. Left to the still visitations of the light from the sun, moon, and stars, and the auroral fires, it is only fit to look upon, and then be given over to its primeval solitariness. But for the living things of its waters, the cod, the salmon and the seal, which bring thousands of adventurous fishermen and traders to its bleak shores, Labrador would be as desolate as Greenland.

We are now entering Battle Harbor, a most romantic nook of water, or Strait rather, between the islands forming the south side of the bay St. Louis. Cariboo Island fronts to the north on the bay, five or six miles, I should guess, and is a rugged mountain-pile of dark gray rock, rounded in its upper masses, and slashed along its shores with abrupt chasms. It drops short off, at its eastern extremity, several hundred feet, into a narrow gulf of deep water. This is Battle Harbor. The billowy pile of igneous rock, perhaps two hundred and fifty feet high, lying between this quiet water and the broad Atlantic, is Battle Island, and the site of the town. We pass a couple of wild islets, lying seaward, as we glide gently along toward our anchorage. There is little to be seen but hard, iron-bound bay, and yet we are all out, gazing abroad with silent curiosity, as if we were entering the Golden Horn. Up runs the Union Jack, and flings its ancient crosses to the sun and breeze, and the fishermen look down upon us from their rude dwellings perched among the crags, and wonder who, and from whence we are. For the moment, nothing seems to be going on but standing still and looking, men, women, and children. And now they will look and wonder still more: up run the Stars and Stripes, higher up than all, and overfloat the flag of England, and salute the sun and cliffs of Labrador. The missionary waves his handkerchief—waves his hat—calls pleasantly to a group upon the nearest shore. They look, and hearken, in the stillness of uncertainty. Instantly there is a movement of recognition. The people know it is their pastor. The intelligence has caught, and runs from house to house. Down drop the sails, rattling down the masts; the anchor plunges, and the cable runs, runs rattling and ringing from its coil. Round the vessel swings in line with the breeze, and comes to its repose. We congratulate the missionary on his safe return, while he points us feelingly to the little church and parsonage, just above us on the mossy hill-side, and bids us welcome as long as we shall find it agreeable to remain. With light and thankful hearts, and pleasant anticipations, we prepare to go ashore, and take our first run upon the hills.

CHAPTER XXXII.

BATTLE ISLAND AND ITS SCENERY.

Wesit down upon the summit of Battle Island, after a zigzag scramble up its craggy side, and talk and sketch and scribble, as we rest and look upon the blue, barren sea, and the brown and more barren continent, with its mountains of desert rock. With all this desolateness, the approaching sunset and the warm skies, the stern headlands, the white icebergs and bleak islands, and the bay with its rays and points of water, like a vast spangle on the savage landscape, all compose a picture of singular novelty and grandeur; at the present moment, wonderfully heightened in beauty and spirit by a distant shower, itself a spectacle of brilliancy and darkness sweeping up from the north. Mr. Hutchinson here joins us, looking all the pleasure that he feels, and points out what is visible of the lengthy, but narrow field of his religious labors. The harbor, with its vessels and various buildings, lies quite below. One could very nearly throw a stone over the little church spire, and shoot a rifle ball into the cliffs opposite. The air is spiced with the most delicate odors, which invites us to a short ramble in search of flowers, after which we descend to the parsonage for tea.

I have stolen out upon the small front piazza with a chair, to enjoy the warm sunshine and the sights of a Labrador village. The parsonage, which has been closed for more than a year past, has been cleaned and put in order by some kind Esquimaux parishioners, and looks neat and comfortable. H—— has taken us all through, from room to room—to the kitchen, pantry, bed-rooms, parlor, which serves also for dining-room, library and study, to the school-room up stairs, which is used at times as a chapel. As we passed the house clock, the pointer still upon the hour where it stopped more than eighteen months ago, the painter wound it up, and gave it a fresh start and the true time, which it began to measure by loud and cheerful ticks, as if conscious that life and spirit had returned again to the vacant dwelling. On the shelf, over the fireplace, lay a prayer-book, the gift of Wordsworth to his nephew, with an affectionate inscription on a fly-leaf, in his own handwriting, while near by stood a couple of small pictures of the poet and his wife.

As some fishermen are now drawing in their capelin seine, we are going to run down and see the sight. And quite a pretty sight it was. Not less than a barrel or two were inclosed, which they dipped with a small scoop-net into their boat, where they lay for a moment, fluttering like so many little birds of gaudy plumage under the fowler’s net. The males and females of these delicate fishes, are called here, very comically, cocks and hens. As our boat, just then, came across from the vessel, the fishers gave us a mess for breakfast, all of half a bushel, which we carried over at once. At the sight of several fine salmon, on the fishing-flake close by, fresh from the net, the poor little capelin sank into immediate contempt. We must have a salmon or two. It was a question whether we could not eat several. It resulted in the purchase of one of sixteen pounds, at the cost of a dollar. We were pulled back immediately in order to sup with Mr. Hutchinson, and spend the remainder of the long, light evening in running over Battle Island. I shall not yield to the temptation to dwell upon the brilliant sunset which we saw from the summit rocks. Its glories were reflected in the bay, and shed upon the grim wilderness, dissolving all its gloomy ruggedness into softest beauty. No language can depict the still and solemn splendor of the icebergs, reposing upon the burnished waters. Temples and mausoleums of dazzling white, warming into tints of pink, or deepening on their shaded side into the sweetest azure, seemed to be standing upon a mighty mirror with their images below. I thought of that standing on the sea of glass, in the glorious visions of St. John, and was filled with emotions of wonder and admiration. The words of the psalmist could hardly fail to be remembered: “These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”

One would think that all is couleur de rose in these lands beyond the reach of fashionable summer tourists. Let him remember that nature here blooms, beautifies, and bears for the entire year, in a few short weeks. We are in the very flush of that transient and charming time. Believe me, when I speak of the plants and flowers, shrubbery and mosses. At this moment, the rocky isle, bombarded by the ocean, and flayed by the sword of the blast for months in the year, is a little paradise of beauty. There are fields of mossy carpet that sinks beneath the foot, with beds of such delicate flowers as one seldom sees.

There is a refined delicacy in the odor, which the ordinary flora of warmer climes seldom has. Some rare exotic, reared with cost, and pampered by all the appliances of art, may suggest the subtle spirit of these tiny blossoms. It steals upon the sense of smell with the indescribable tenderness of the music of the æolian harp upon the ear. As I enjoy it, I know that I cannot paint it to the reader, and that I shall probably never “look upon its like again.” It is very likely that the cool and very pure air, a refinement of our common atmosphere, has much to do with it.

In our stroll, we found banks of snow still sleeping in the fissures above the showering of the surf, and peeping out from beneath their edges were clusters of pretty flowers. As we returned in the twilight, upon the mournful stillness of which broke the voice of the surge, I lingered upon the cliffs to listen to the wood-thrush, the same most plaintive and sweet bird that sings in the Catskill mountain woods, at dusk and in the early morning. The pathos of its wild melody stole in upon the heart, waking “thoughts too deep for tears,” and calling up a throng of tender memories of Cole and others, with whom the songster, the hour, and mountain scenery are forever associated. Startled by the voices of my companions, one a nephew of the famous poet, and the other a pupil of the painter scarcely less renowned, I hastened to join them at the humble parsonage below the cliffs, when we went across to the vessel, and united, for the last time in the cabin, in those pleasant devotions which we had enjoyed, morning and evening, since our departure from St. Johns.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

MOSSES, ODORS AND FLOWERS.—A DINNER-PARTY.

Friday,July 8, 1859. A bright, cool morning. After breakfast at the parsonage, we went rambling again up and down the moss-covered fields of Battle Island, smelling the fine perfume, gathering flowers, and counting the icebergs. There are more than forty in the neighborhood, and some of them grand and imposing at a distance. Have you thought, as I did, that there are no flowers, or next to none, in Labrador? You might as well have thought that all, or nearly all the flowers were in Florida. Along the brook-banks under the Catskills—to me about the loveliest banks on earth, in the late spring and early summer days—I have never seen such fairy loveliness as I find here upon this bleak islet, where nature seems to have been playing at Switzerland. Green and yellow mosses, ankle-deep and spotted with blood-red stains, carpet the crags and little vales and cradle-like hollows. Wonderful to behold! flowers pink and white, yellow, red and blue, are countless as dew-drops, and breathe out upon the pure air that odor, so spirit-like. Such surely was the perfume of Eden around the footsteps of the Lord, walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day. What grounds these, for such souls as write, “The moss supplicateth for the poet,” and the closing lines of the “Ode, Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early Childhood.” The Painter, passionately in love with the flowers of the tropics, lay down and rolled upon these soft, sweet beds of beauty with delight. Little gorges and chasms, overhung with miniature precipices, wind gracefully from the summits down to meet the waves, and are filled, where the sun can warm them, with all bloom and sweetness, a kind of wild greenhouse. We run up them, and we run down them, fall upon the cushioned stones, tumble upon their banks of softness as children tumble upon deep feather-beds, and dive into the yielding cradles embroidered with silken blossoms. Willows with a silvery down upon the leaves, willow-trees no larger than fresh lettuce, and the mountain laurel of the size of knitting-needles, with pink flowers to correspond, cluster here and there in patches of a breadth to suit a sleeping child.

After our ramble, we returned on board, arranged the cabin, now become quite roomy from the departure of our friends, and prepared for dinner, to which a small company is invited. Our cook, a young Sandy, excelling in good nature, but failing in all the essentials of his art, was suspended, for the time, from the exercise of all duties about the caboose, except those of the mere lackey, and two more important personages self-inducted into his place. Some pounds of fresh salmon bagged in linen, a measure of peeled potatoes, a pudding of rice well shotted with raisins, one after another, found their way to the oven and the boilers; from which, in due time and order, they emerged in a satisfactory condition, and, with appropriate sauce and gravy, descended in savory procession to the cabin, to which they were unexpectedly welcomed by a whole dress circle of fashionable dishes seated in the surrounding berths, jelly-cake, sponge-cake, raspberry-jam, nuts, figs, almonds and raisins, and a corpulent pitcher, sweating in his naked white, filled with iceberg water. It is not necessary to dwell upon the fact, that the cooks subsided into the more quiet character of hosts, and made themselves, and endeavored to make their guests, merry at their own expense. Whether the Queen of England, or the President of the United States will be pleased, it never occurred to us at the time, when, without thinking of either, we drank to their health in the transparent vintage of Greenland.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

OUR BOAT FOR THE ICEBERGS.—AFTER THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDY OF ITS WESTERN FACE.

Afterdinner. Mr. Hutchinson has placed at our service his parish vessel, at once a schooner and a row-boat, of which Captain Knight, of course, is master, and our men the sailors. We are all ready, waiting its arrival alongside, in order for our first excursion after icebergs, equipped entirely to our mind.

An hour’s sail has brought us off into the broad waters, south of Battle Harbor, close to a berg selected from the heights this morning. We drop sails, and row rapidly around it, for the best point of observation in the present light. The intention is to study the ices of these waters, at all points, and in all lights, with great care. From this, the western side, now glittering in the face of the sun, at six o’clock, it is alpine in its form, with one crowning peak, supported by pinnacles and buttresses, with intervening gulfs and hollows, each with its torrent hissing along down in white haste over glassy cliffs and in alabaster channels, until it comes spouting into the sea from an overhanging precipice, varying from six, to twenty feet in height. Between the upper edge of this ice-coast and the great steeps of the berg, lies a broad slope, smooth as ivory, a paradise for the boys of a village school. We are actually tempted to land at a low place, and have a run. Without skates, or some arming of the boots, however, we guess it would be rather perilous sport; in short, simply impossible. We content ourselves with catching a panfull of water, fresh from the great Humboldt glacier, quite likely, and cold and pure it is. While we are busy at the fountain, we amuse ourselves with looking down through the clear, green water—right under us, clear almost as air—at the roots and prongs of the mountain mass. They shoot out into the dark sea below far beyond our boat, not a pleasing vision to dwell upon, when we reflect, that these very prongs and spurs only wait to take their turn in the sunshine, under the aspect of upright towers. A heavy fall of ice, which may happen in a minute, on the opposite side of the berg, instantly gives the preponderance to this, when over this way slowly rolls the alpine peak, down sinks all this precipice, and after it, all the slanting field above; then on rushes the sea in curling waves, and we are swept on with them. Before we can get back, and get away to a safe distance, by the force of mere sailor power, back rolls the berg, up rises the broad slope, followed quickly by the precipices rising up, up, and up into lofty cliffs, with a foreground, a new revelation of ice; in a word, the prongs and spurs now below us in the transparent deep. In all this play of the iceberg and the sea, what will be our part? And who knows whether the moment is not now close upon us for this sparkling planet of the main to burst asunder, a common process by which the mother berg throws off her little ones, rather, resolves herself entirely into a shoal of small icebergs? Should that moment really come while we are in this fearful proximity, you need not ask any questions about us, except those which you yourself can answer. There are the dead in these very waters, I believe, whose last earthly experience was among the final thunders of these ices.

I am struck with the rapid rate at which the bergs are perishing. They are dissolving at every point and pore, both in the air and in the sea. One sheet of water, although no thicker than a linen sheet, covers the entire alp. It trickles from every height, yonder glimmering like a distant window in the sunset, here cutting into the glassy surface and working out a kind of jewelry, which sparkles with points of emerald and ruby. It rains from eves and gables, cornices and balconies, and spouts from gutters. All around, there is the pattering of a shower on the sea, and the sharp, metallic ringing of great drops, similar to what is heard around a pond in the still woods, when the dew-drops fall from the overhanging boughs. Below, the currents, now penetrated with the summer warmth, are washing it away. Around the surface-line, the ever-busy waves are polishing the newly-broken corners, and cutting under, and mining their way in, with deceitful rapidity. Unceasingly they bore and drill, without holiday or sabbath, or rest at night, as the perpetual thunders of their blasting testify. Thus their ruin is hourly hastening to a consummation, and the danger of approaching them made more and more imminent. The iceberg in winter, in the Arctic regions, and even here, is a different affair. In the cold, they are tolerably safe and sound. But now, in these comparatively tepid seas, and in this warm atmosphere, lone wanderer, it finds no mercy. Motionless as this and several bergs appear, they are all slowly moving in toward the Strait of Belle Isle, borne forward by the great Baffin current, a stream of which bends around Cape St. Louis and these adjacent isles, and sets along the shore of Labrador into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDIES OF ITS SOUTHERN FRONT.—FRIGHTFUL EXPLOSION AND FALL OF ICE.—STUDIES OF THE WESTERN SIDE.—OUR PLAY WITH THE MOOSE HORNS.—THE SPLENDOR OF THE BERG IN THE SUNSET.

Weare now lying under oars, riding quietly on the swells, distant, say, a hundred yards south of the berg, which has a visible, perpendicular front of five hundred, by one hundred and fifty feet or more elevation. It resembles a precipice of newly-broken porcelain, wet and dripping, its vast face of dead white tinged with green, here and there, from the reflection of the green water at its base. We are in its shadow, which reaches off on the sunny sea, a long, dark track. The outline of the berg is one edge of dazzling brightness, a kind of irregular, flowing frame, gilt with sunlight, which comes pouring over in full tide from behind. Where the ice shoots up into thin spear-points, or runs along a semi-transparent blade, the light shines through, and gives the tint of flame, with a greenish band below, and lower still, a soft blue, presently lost in the broad white. In these ices, never think of any such as you see at home, from Rockland and Catskill. Frozen under enormous pressure, and frozen to dry and flinty hardness, it has all the sparkle of minutest crystallization, and resembles, as I have said already, freshly broken statue-marble or porcelain, as you see it on the edge newly snapped. The surface of this ice is in itself a study singularly complex and subtle. How the mere passer-by, at a distance, is going to know any thing of value to a painter, I cannot tell. The fact is, he knows just nothing at all. A portrait-painter might as well pretend to have a knowledge of flesh, from seeing people at a distance. I think if I could study just here, for hours, I should be able to speak more correctly. Of course, the Painter, whose eye is trained to look into the texture of surfaces, sees all more readily. I am looking up to rough crags, and enormous bulges, where the recent fracture would seem to have an almost painful sharpness to the touch. Where the surfaces have been for a time exposed to the weather, they have the flesh-finish of a statue. Along the lower portion, where you see the glassing effects of the waves, there it resembles the rarest Sèvres vase, or even pearl itself, so exquisitely fine is the polish. It is almost mirror-like. You perceive the dim images of passing objects, shadowy ships and shores. Where the light pours over it in its strength, it shines like burnished steel in the sunshine.

Under the manifold effects of atmosphere, light and shade, none can imagine, through the medium of mere description, the grandeur and glory of these moving Alps of ice. Here now, is one simple feature, which our dangerous proximity alone enables us to view, the wondrous beauty of which—beauty to the feelings as well as to the eye—I cannot find any language to paint. I may talk of it through a hundred periods, and yet you will never feel and see a tithe of what you would in a moment, were you here upon the spot. The berg, in the deep shadow of which we now sit painting and writing, as I have intimated, is in form a mountain pinnacle, split down from the summit square, and the split side toward our boat. What has became of the lost half, the Great Builder of icebergs only knows. We are under the cliffs, from which that unknown part burst off and fell away. It is an awful precipice, with all the features of precipices, such as are seen about capes, headlands and ocean shores. Here it swells out, there it sinks in, masses have slidden out, and left square-headed doorways opening into the solid porcelain, ridges run off, and hollows run in and around. In these very hollows and depressions is the one feature of which I am speaking. And, after all, what is it? It is simply shadow. Is that all? That is all: only shadow. All the grand façade is one shadow, with a rim of splendor like liquid gold leaf or yellow flame, but in those depressions is adeepershadow. Shadow under shadow, dove-colored and blue. Thus there seems to be drifting about, in the hollow lurking-places of the dead white, a colored atmosphere, the warmth, softness, and delicate beauty of which no mind can think of words to express. So subtle is it and evanescent, that recollection cannot recall it when once gone, but by the help of the heart and the feelings, where the spirit of beauty last dies away. You can feel it, after you have forgotten what its complexion precisely is, and from that emotion you may come to remember it. You would remember nothing more beautiful.

PLATE No. 4.ICE FALLING FROM A LOFTY BERGLith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.

Any doubt that I may have entertained about the danger of lying under the shadow of this great ice-rock is now wholly dispelled. We have just witnessed what was, for the moment, a perfect cataract of ice, with all its motion, and many times its noise. Quick as lightning and loud as thunder, when bolt and thunder come at the same instant, there was one terrific crack, a sharp and silvery ringing blow upon the atmosphere, which I shall never forget, nor ever be able to describe. It shook me through, and struck the very heart. The only response on my part, and I was not alone in the fright, was a convulsive spring to the feet, and a shout to the oarsmen, of fierce command, “Row back! row back!” The spectacle was nearly as startling as the explosion. At once, the upper face of the berg burst out upon the air, as if it had been blasted, and swept down across the great cliff, a huge cataract of green and snowy fragments, with a wild, crashing roar, followed by the heavy, sullen thunder of the plunge into the ocean, and the rolling away of the high-crested seas, and the rocking of the mighty mass back and forth, in the effort to regain its equilibrium. I dreaded the encounter; but our whale-boat was quite at home, and breasted the lofty swells most gracefully. But how fearfully impressive is all this! I recall the warning of the Bishop of Newfoundland, and recollect the conversation of the Rev. Mr. Wood, the rector of St. Thomas’.

We now pass round to the other side of the berg, and take a position between it and the sun. Upon our first circumnavigation, we found this edge of the ice, in its lowest part, about six feet above the sea, with a cavernous hollow running all round, into which the waves were playing with their strange and many sounds. Now, from the recent loss of ice on the opposite heights, all this edge has sunk below the waves, leaving only an inclined plane sweeping up from the water’s edge to the steeper parts of the berg, at an angle of about 20 degrees. Fancy a slab of Italian marble, four and five hundred feet in width, extending from the eaves of the City Hall, New York, half-way or more down the park. I think you will have a tolerable notion of the slope now before us. Up this slippery field of ivory hardness roll the waves, dark as night until they strike the ice, when, in a flash, they turn into that lovely green of the sea, and afterward break in long lines of tumultuous foam. The spectacle is perfectly magnificent. A seam of ice, apparently six inches in diameter, of the hue of a sapphire, cuts the berg from its very top down, and doubtless cuts through the entire submarine body. This jewel of the iceberg is a wonderful beauty. Sparkles of light seem to come from its blue, transparent depths. What, at first, appears singular is, that these blue veins are much softer than the surrounding ice, melting faster, and so becoming channels in which little torrents glitter as they run. At first, we were at a loss to know how they originated, but presently felt satisfied, that they were cracks filled with water, and frozen when the berg was a glacier. This indelible mark of primitive breakage and repair indicates with some correctness the original perpendicular of the ice. According to the blue band in the berg now before us, it is occupying very nearly the position it was in when it was a fissure or crevasse of the glacier. Long processional lines of broken ice are continually floating off from the parent berg, which, in the process of melting, assume many curious shapes, huge antlers of the moose and elk, and sea-fowl, geese and ducks, of gigantic figure. We have just succeeded in securing one of these antlers, and a merry time we had. Before reaching it, we supposed one could bend over and lift it out of the water as easily as he stoops and picks up a buck’s horn out of the prairie grass. It was a match for three of us, and escaped out of our hands and arms repeatedly, slipping back into the waves, and requiring us to round to again and again before we fairly had it. As it is the hardest and the heaviest, so it is the most slippery of all ices, and certainly it seems to me the coldest thing upon which human hands were ever laid. Our summer cakes, handed in by the ice-man, are warm, I fancy, in comparison. I do not wonder that the face of icebergs burst off, under the expansion of the heat they receive in these July days. The surface of this horn is not the least curious feature of it: it is melted into circular depressions about the depth and size of a large watch-crystal, all cutting into each other with such regularity that their angles fall into lines parallel and diagonal in the most artistic manner. Now that we have it in the boat, it resembles a pair of mammoth moose-horns sculptured from water-soaked alabaster. We see several of them now, five or six feet tall, rocking and nodding on the swells as if they were the living appendages of some old moose of the briny deep, come up to sport a little in the world of warmth and sunshine.

C⁠—— finds great difficulty in painting, from the motion of the boat; but it is the best thing in the service, after all, for the men can take a position, and keep it by the help of oars, in spite of the waves and currents which beset an iceberg. The moments for which we have been waiting are now passing, and the berg is immersed in almost supernatural splendors. The white alpine peak rises out of a field of delicate purple, fading out on one edge into pale sky-blue. Every instant changes the quality of the colors. They flit from tint to tint, and dissolve into other hues perpetually, and with a rapidity impossible to describe or paint. I am tempted to look over my shoulder into the north, and see if the “merry dancers” are not coming, so marvellously do the colors come and go. The blue and the purple pass up into peach-blow and pink. Now it blushes in the last look of the sun-red blushes of beauty—tints of the roseate birds of the south—the complexion of the roses of Damascus. In this delicious dye it stands embalmed—only for a minute, though; for now the softest dove-colors steal into the changing glory, and turn it all into light and shade on the whitest satin. The bright green waves are toiling to wash it whiter, as they roll up from the violet sea, and explode in foam along the broad alabaster. Power and Beauty, hand in hand, bathing the bosom of Purity. I need not pause to explain how all this is; but so it is, and many times more, in the passing away of the sunshine and the daylight. It is wonderful! I had never dreamed of it, even while I have been reading of icebergs well described. As I sit and look at this broken work of the Divine fingers,—only a shred broken from the edge of a glacier, vast as it is—I whisper these words of Revelation: “and hath washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” It hangs before us, with the sea and the sky behind it, like some great robe made in heaven. Where the flowing folds break into marble-like cliffs, on the extreme wings of the berg, an inward green seems to be pricking through a fine straw tint, spangled with gold. Weary, chilly, and a little sea-sick, I am glad to find the Painter giving the last touches to a sketch, and to hear him give the word for return. The men, who in common with all these people of this northern sea have a terror of icebergs, gladly lift the sails, and so, with Captain Knight at the helm, we are speeding over the waves for Battle Harbor.

Back to Index Next