Although At Any Other Time The Terrible Climate We Had Dived Into Would Have Been Very Depressing, Under Present Circumstances I Think The Change Rather Tended To Raise Our Spirits, Perhaps Because The Idea Of Fog And Ice In The Month Of June Seemed So Completely To Uncockneyfy Us.

At all events there was no doubt now we had got into les mers glaciales, as our French friends called them, and, whatever else might be in store for us, there was sure henceforth to be no lack of novelty and excitement.

By this time it was already well on in the evening, so having agreed with Monsieur de la Ronciere on a code of signals in case of fogs, and that a jack hoisted at the mizen of the "Reine Hortense," or at the fore of the schooner, should be an intimation of a desire of one or other to cast off, we got into the boat and were dropped down alongside our own ship. Ever since leaving Iceland the steamer had been heading east-north-east by compass, but during the whole of the ensuing night she shaped a south-east course; the thick mist rendering it unwise to stand on any longer in the direction of the banquise, as they call the outer edge of the belt that hems in Eastern Greenland. About three A.M. it cleared up a little. By breakfast time the sun re-appeared, and we could see five or six miles ahead of the vessel. It was shortly after this, that as I was standing in the main rigging peering out over the smooth blue surface of the sea, a white twinkling point of light suddenly caught my eye about a couple of miles off on the port bow, which a telescope soon resolved into a solitary isle of ice, dancing and dipping in the sunlight. As you may suppose, the news brought everybody upon deck, and when almost immediately afterwards a string of other pieces, glittering like a diamond necklace, hove in sight, the excitement was extreme.

Here at all events was honest blue saltwater frozen solid, and when, as we proceeded, the scattered fragments thickened, and passed like silver argosies on either hand, until at last we found oumelves enveloped in an innumerable fleet of bergs, - it seemed as if we could never be weary of admiring a sight so strange and beautiful. It was rather in form and colour than in size that these ice islets were remarkable; anything approaching to a real iceberg we neither saw, nor are we likely to see. In fact, the lofty ice mountains that wander like vagrant islands along the coast of America, seldom or never come to the eastward or northward of Cape Farewell. They consist of land ice, and are all generated among bays and straits within Baffin's Bay, and first enter the Atlantic a good deal to the southward of Iceland; whereas the Polar ice, among which we have been knocking about, is field ice, and - except when packed one ledge above the other, by great pressure - is comparatively flat.

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