Tom Finchs Monkey, and how he dined with the Admiral | Page 8

had, to be more correct--perilously near an iceberg, when my nautical friend proceeded to give vent to his own exposition of the "glacial theory," saying that a lot of nonsense was written about the ice in the Arctic regions by people who never went beyond their own firesides at home and had never seen an iceberg. It made him mad, he said, to read it!
"I daresay you've read a lot of rubbish on the subject?" said the old gentleman, getting excited about the matter, as if he only wanted a good start to be off and away on his hobby.
"I daresay I have," I replied.
"Well, what with all the fiction that has been written and the fabulous stories told of the Arctic and its belongings, the `green hand' who makes the voyage for the first time is full of expectations concerning all the wonderful sights he's going to see in `the perennial realms of ice and snow'--that's the phrase the newspaper chaps always use-- expectations which are bound to be disappointed,--and why?"
"I'm sure I can't tell!" said I.
"Because the things that he fancies he's going to see don't really exist, nor never yet did in spite of what book-learned people may say! The voyager who goes north for the first time is bound, let us say for illustration, for Baffin's Bay; and, from what he has learnt beforehand, bears and walruses, seals and sea-lions, whale blubber and the Esquimaux who eat it, all occupy some considerable share of his imagination. But, above all these, the first thing that he looks forward to see are the icebergs, or floating mountains of ice, which are so especially the creation of the cold regions, to which he is sailing. These icebergs, sir, form the staple background of every Arctic view, without which none would be deemed for a moment complete. Their gigantic peaks and jagged precipices are familiar to most, in a score of pictures and engravings drawn by artists who were never beyond the Lizard Lights; and really, I believe that if one was sketched that wasn't at least a thousand feet high or more, and didn't have a polar bear perched on top and a full rigged ship sailing right underneath it, why, the generality of people would think it wasn't a bit like the real thing!"
"And what is the `real thing' like?" I asked with some curiosity.
"There you have me," said the old sailor, who had from his speech evidently received a good education; and if once "before the mast" had now certainly risen to something much higher. "To men whose minds have been wrought up to such a pitch of fancy and expectation, the first sight of a real iceberg is a complete take-down to their imagination. Your ship is pitching about, say, in the cross seas near the mouth of Davis Strait, preparatory to entering within the smooth water of the Arctic circle, when in the far distance your eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life's young dream to learn is an iceberg--though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave- worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the `bergy bit,' as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh--the process being always going on, never ending!"
"Why, you are quite a philosopher," I observed.
"A bit of a one, sir," said the old gentleman with a smile. "Those who go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship proceeds