re as amber, though
more varied in color. One saw about him cliffs, basaltic columns, frozen
down, arabesques, fretted traceries, sculptured urns, arches supporting
broad tables or sloping roofs, lifted pinnacles, boulders, honey-combs,
slanting strata of rock, gigantic birds, mastodons, maned lions,
couching or rampant,--a fantasy of forms, and, between all, the shining,
shining sea. In sunshine, these shapes were of a glistening white
flecked with stars, where at points the white was lost in the glisten;
in half shadow the color was gray, in full shadow aerial purple; while,
wherever the upper portions projected over the sea, and took its
reflection, they often did, the color was an infinite, emerald intensity
of green; beneath all which, under water, was a base or shore of dead
emerald, a green paled with chalk. Blue was not this day seen, perhaps
because this was shore-ice rather than floe,--made, not like the floes,
of frozen sea, but of compacted and saturated snow.

Just before evening came, when the courteous breeze folded its light
fans fell asleep, we left this field behind, and, seeing all clear
ahead, supposed the whole had been passed. In truth, as had soon to
learn, this twenty-mile strip of shore-ice was but the advance-guard of
an immeasurable field or army of floe. For there came down the northern
coast, in this summer of 1864, more than a thousand miles' length, with
a breadth of about a hundred miles, of floe-ice in a field almost
unbroken! More than a thousand miles, by accurate computation! The
courtesy of the Westerner--who, having told of seeing a flock of pigeons
nine miles long, so dense as to darken the sun at noonday, and meeting
objections from a skeptical Yankee, magnanimously offered, as a personal
favor, to "take out a quarter of a mile from the thinnest part"--cannot
be imitated here. I must still say _more_ than a thousand miles,--and
this, too, the second run of ice!

Captain Linklater, master of the Moravian supply-ship, a man of acute
observation and some science, had, as he afterwards told me at Hopedale,
measured the rate of travel of the ice, and found it to be twenty-seven
miles a day. Our passengers were sure they saw it going at the rate of
three or four miles an hour. Captain Handy, looking with experienced
eye, pronounced this estimate excessive, and said it went from one to
one and a half miles an hour,--twenty-four to thirty-six miles a day.
Captain Linklater, however, had