BY FRED S. MILLER
There is one, and but one, danger to navigation against which the ingenuity of navigators is absolutely powerless, and this danger is formed by the vast icebergs—floating ice-prairies, some of them—which every month in the year, but more particularly in winter months, are sent in shoals from the Arctic and the Antarctic regions to float down the currents of the ocean until they are finally melted and mingled with warm waters. A brief account of the origin of these marine monsters, their action and the manifold dangers they present to sailors, will be of interest.
Greenland is the breeder of the iceberg for the northern seas. Greenland is a mysterious continent on which no vegetable life can endure. Its exact limits have never yet been traced, but is known to be comparatively flat, though covered to immense depths by snow and ice. This snow and ice forms constantly throughout the year, and has so formed since prehistoric times. It heaps up so that the surface of Greenland may be roughly compared to a vast hill. The enormous weight of this constantly forming ice causes movements of the masses from the center to the sea, and thus the glaciers are formed—vast processions of granite-hard ice which “flow” very slowly but irresistibly and for vast extents down to the water.
The size of these great moving plains is indeed almost unbelievable. The Humboldt glacier is sixty miles broad, its walls rise three hundred feet from the place where it meets the sea, and as to its depth inland it has been plumbed for half a mile. Every year it sends out over the ocean a mass whose area is greater than that of the State of New Jersey.
Another of the great Greenland glaciers, called the Jacobshaven glacier, is two thousand feet broad and one thousand feet high, and its output to the sea is estimated as being over 400,000,000,000 cubic feet of ice yearly.
Thousands of miles of this matter are constantly being emptied into the ocean, the rate of progress being about forty-two feet a day. Immense masses of solid ice creep along the shore, at the water’s edge presenting a vertical face of steel-blue ice hard as flint, against which dash the angry waves of the Arctic. Out this ice pushes, day after day, until finally its own weight or the action of the water causes vast sections to break off with a roar like that of a thousand thunder claps and with a disturbance in the ocean that could only be compared to the commotion caused by the birth of a new island. Thus born, the berg floats gently down the currents for the Grand Banks of Labrador, where the fogs and mists that continually wreathe that region, shut the icy menace from view of the anxious mariner frequently until it is too late for him to turn his vessel to avoid them. In such weather it is of no help for the lookout on the tops that the iceberg frequently towers hundreds of feet into the air. It cannot be seen for the dense blanket of fog that shuts out sight and shuts out sound, so that even the wash of the waves dashing against the base of the approaching destroyer cannot be heard. Only by the cold radiated from it may its presence be guessed, but if the wind is blowing from the vessel to the berg the temperate cannot be felt lowering until the boat is so near that it is impossible to turn it before the crash comes.
Again, many of these great masses cannot be seen above the surface of the sea as they only extend comparatively a few feet into the air. Nevertheless eight-ninths of the berg is always under water, so that, especially at night, a vast plateau of ice may be gliding towards a steamer and giving no indication of its presence.
The steamer Saale, coming over the same course as that taken by the Titanic, was in 1890 subjected to almost the same experience although she escaped as by a miracle. Rushing along in the midnight gloom its path was suddenly barred by a black rampart of steely ice, 100 feet high. The lookout gave timely warning, the engines were reversed and the helm put hard aport, so that the steamer barely crunched along over the submerged foot of the berg, bumping heavily a few times and being shot off into deep water sidewise so that the coal and cargo were shifted. This listed the vessel heavily, in which plight she proceeded slowly to port, her starboard rail barely clearing the water.
The Normania, in 1900, had a similar experience. It turned just in time to avoid a direct impact with an immense berg, but it ran alongside of the floating mountain, shearing its sides and showering itself with ice scraped off, which loaded the decks.
But these are merely lucky escapes. By far the greater number of vessels, once they touch the frightful mass of beetling crag and jagged base, are lost on the moment of impact, the passengers being lucky if they have the time and the boats to escape with. The record of the sea is heavy with the account of gallant ships that perished, some with all on board. Many is the number that went down and were never heard from nor a vestige of them seen, but which were supposed to have been overborne by icebergs. Until very recent years the wireless telegraph was unheard of and ships suddenly overtaken could not communicate their plight but must vanish without leaving a record that they had ever been. In this way went the Ismalia, the Columbo, the Homer, Zanzibar, Surbiton and Bernicia, and to this day no light has been thrown on the mystery of their loss. Of course there are many more similar cases, any year of the last twenty being prolific with instances of these mysteriously disappearing ships.
The only vessel that can hope to escape destruction by contact with an iceberg is the especially strengthened ship built for Arctic exploration. Ships like the Fram of Amundson, or Peary’s ship, are proof against even a head-on collision as they are very strong and very light. But an ocean liner is especially vulnerable. Going at the rapid speed that is nearly always maintained on these palatial ships, and with their enormous weight and displacement and their comparatively weak structure, the momentum which they acquire shatters them like glass when it is brought to an instant stop against a sluggish-moving mass say a mile long, two hundred feet above the water, 1,600 feet below the water, of a weight incalculably great and of a hardness like granite.
Much time has been spent and many efforts have been made to devise some instrument or discover some means whereby the presence of an approaching iceberg might be detected, but so far little progress has been made toward perfecting anything that at all answers the requirements. The towering berg can of course be seen for miles unless hidden by the fog, but what of the immense masses that lie scarcely visible in the water yet wholly destructive of whatever ship shall hurl itself upon that jagged floating reef of ice-coral? Ships that run on top of such bergs break literally in two, as their keels are not made to sustain a strain of balancing or “teetering” as the ship does when it runs upon the uneven surface of the berg.
But if icebergs are terrible they are beyond doubt among the most beautiful and superb manifestations of nature. Think of a mass of glittering minarets and towers, of domes, arches, colonnades, spires and special forms and features of its own uniquely beautiful—think of such a mass irradiant with a thousand variations of the rainbow hues and flashing in the sunlight of a northern summer day; think of a landscapeful of this delirious beauty, a bulk as large as the state of Rhode Island, moving majestically to the open ocean, breaking into mysterious peals of thunder as it dominates the sea! Perhaps it will receive and override some goodly vessel in its unruffled progress from the cold inconceivable which brought it forth. Perhaps the luckless voyagers will view its dreadful shape with an awe that will impel them rather to perish in the deep than to endeavor to seek refuge on the sheer and frigid walls that have o’erborne their ship. But presently the enormous edifice of ice itself shall sink and perish in the sea, merged with the enervating waters of the Gulf Stream—o’erborne as all things are and set to uses new by that emanation called by the learned “the opposition of forces” and by the wise called God, which keeps His ministering universe in equipoise and holds its balance true.