It Was A Contrast To Much That We Had Lately Seen, And A
Spectacle Not Only Of Beauty, But Of
Life; for it required but
little fancy to imagine these islands to be animate masses which
had broken loose from
The "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,"
and were working their way, by wind and current, some alone,
and some in fleets, to milder climes. No pencil has ever yet
given anything like the true effect of an iceberg. In a picture,
they are huge, uncouth masses, stuck in the sea, while their chief
beauty and grandeur, - their slow, stately motion; the whirling
of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and
cracking of their parts, - the picture cannot give. This is the
large iceberg; while the small and distant islands, floating on
the smooth sea, in the light of a clear day, look like little
floating fairy isles of sapphire.
From a north-east course we gradually hauled to the eastward, and
after sailing about two hundred miles, which brought us as near to
the western coast of Terra del Fuego as was safe, and having lost
sight of the ice altogether, - for the third time we put the ship's
head to the southward, to try the passage of the Cape. The weather
continued clear and cold, with a strong gale from the westward,
and we were fast getting up with the latitude of the Cape, with a
prospect of soon being round. One fine afternoon, a man who had
gone into the fore-top to shift the rolling tackles, sung out, at
the top of his voice, and with evident glee, - "Sail ho!" Neither
land nor sail had we seen since leaving San Diego; and any one who
has traversed the length of a whole ocean alone, can imagine what
an excitement such an announcement produced on board. "Sail ho!"
shouted the cook, jumping out of his galley; "Sail ho!" shouted
a man, throwing back the slide of the scuttle, to the watch below,
who were soon out of their berths and on deck; and "Sail ho!"
shouted the captain down the companion-way to the passenger in
the cabin. Besides the pleasure of seeing a ship and human beings
in so desolate a place, it was important for us to speak a vessel,
to learn whether there was ice to the eastward, and to ascertain the
longitude; for we had no chronometer, and had been drifting about
so long that we had nearly lost our reckoning, and opportunities
for lunar observations are not frequent or sure in such a place as
Cape Horn. For these various reasons, the excitement in our little
community was running high, and conjectures were made, and everything
thought of for which the captain would hail, when the man aloft sung
out - "Another sail, large on the weather bow!"
This was a little odd, but so much the better, and did not shake
our faith in their being sails. At length the man in the top
hailed, and said he believed it was land, after all.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 250 of 324
Words from 130517 to 131031
of 170236
