ice, whenever it presents what our charts are pleased to call an 'impenetrable barrier.' That this is really the fact we infer from what happens in Davis's Strait, where it has frequently been observed that an ice-berg, apparently fixed in the midst of a field of ice, will break through it, and move along in a contrary direction to the field ice, to the wind, and to the upper current. This is a fact known to thousands, and is particularly noticed by that intelligent naturalist and missionary, Fabricius: It is truly surprizing (he says) to observe the rapidity with which a mountain of ice will sometimes move even against the wind; the reason of which is, that the base, sinking deeply into the water, is acted upon by the current below with greater force than the wind can exert on the smaller part above the surface; and this is the case even when the upper current, caused by the wind, runs in a different direction to that below;' and thus,' he continues, from the bases of ice-bergs being of different depths, one may conceive how it is that one mountain moves along with greater velocity than another, or even in an opposite direction.' Here then is the mystery solved; the field-ice, by blocking up the surface of Behring's Strait, may cause the stagnation of the superficial current and force the water to rush beneath it into the polar basin, as we have already stated, without being observed on the surface.

We have but few lights to guide us in tracing this current through the unknown arctic sea or polar basin; but those few are favourable to our hypothesis. From the diverging of the two continents it will necessarily take the direction of both; of that which flows along the northern coast of America we literally know nothing; but the current which comes down Davis's Strait must either have ranged that coast, or originated in the polar sea, or, which is the least likely of all, in a close bay. On the northern coast of Siberia, however, a fact or two may be found in favour of the hypothesis. Shalaurof, in his voyage from the mouth of the Lena, eastward, or towards Behring's Strait, was stopped in his progress when opposite the Kovyma by an opposing current setting westerly, at the rate of a verst an hour, and car rying with it large bodies of floating ice.* Near the island of Sabadéi he made his vessel fast to the ice, and found that he was carried along with it to the westward by a current setting at the rate of five versts an hour; and it is further stated, as something remarkable, that, on his return to the Lena, 'he found the currents setting almost uniformly from the eastward+-that is to say, from Behring's Strait towards the Atlantic. Approaching nearer to the opening into this latter ocean, we find, from the accounts of

* Russian Discoveries.-p. 389. + Ibid.-391.

the

the old navigators, that a current was perceived to set from the northern part of Nova Zembla, and from Wygat Strait towards Spitzbergen; and from Spitzbergen it is well known to all the whale fishers that it invariably sets to the south-west, and determines the general position of the ice in this sea, from which such stupendous fields have recently broke loose, and disappeared in the warmer temperature of the Atlantic.

Having thus traced the waters of the Pacific through Behring's Strait, along the two shores of the polar basin, down Davis's Strait and the sea of Spitzbergen into the Atlantic;—and having, besides, in a former Article, noticed the passage of ice-bergs and ice-fields, of wounded whales and drift-wood, as further proofs of a northern communication between the Pacific and the Atlantic;-it remains only to state a few additional facts, which, in our opinion, still more strongly favour the hypothesis of such a communication.

Fabricius, who resided several years in Greenland, and collected many valuable facts, mentions, among others, the following curious. circumstance which occurred while he was there: A Greenlander,' says he, brought to me one day from the floating ice the skull, hoofs and hairs of a beast of the ox genus, which had probably been devoured by a bear.' He then proceeds to describe every part with great minuteness, and observes, that it appeared to him to be that species of wild ox which best answers the description of the bos grunniens of Linnæus, or the yak or Tartaric cow peculiar to northern Asia; and as this notion fell in with his theory of currents from the earth's motion, long since exploded, he concludes that it must have floated on the ice all the way from Tartary, round Spitzbergen, and up Davis's Strait with the eddy current, which is known to set for a little distance round Cape Farewell. Fortunately he has given a figure of this animal in his Fauna Grönlandica, from which it is quite evident that it is not the Asiatic bos grunniens, but the American species bos moschatus, or the musk ox, which frequents the northern shores of that continent, and which was then unknown to Fabricius, who otherwise could scarcely have failed to assign, as the vehicle of this animal, the West Ice, as he calls those fields and islands which are brought down from the north-west.

The principal part of the drift-wood thrown upon the northern shores of Spitzbergen* and Iceland and the western coast of Old Greenland, being equally the produce of North America and northern Asia and Europe, may have floated down the rivers of those

On an island near the northern extremity of Spitzbergen, fir trees were found seventy feet long, which had been torn up by the roots. Others had been cut down with the axe, and notched for twelve-feet lengths; not the least decayed, nor the strokes of the hatchet in the least effaced.-Phipps's Voyage towards the North Pole, p. 58. continents

continents into the polar basin; but this could not be the case with regard to the logs perforated by the sea-worn, an animal which operates only in a warm climate.* We have not been able to trace the camphor wood beyond the Aleutian islands, but its having reached that high latitude may assist in explaining another fact in favour of a circumvolving current. The governor of the Danish settlement of Disco, on the west coast of Old Greenland, is possessed of a mahogany table made out of a plank which was drifted thither by the southerly current; not far from the same place there was also taken up a tree of logwood. These products of the isthmus which connects the two Americas could only reach the spot on which they were found by the way of Behring's Strait, along the coast of America, and down Baftin's sea. Had they floated into the gulf of Mexico, they might have been carried by the gulf-stream to the banks of Newfoundland, and from thence to any part of Europe, from the coast of Norway to the strait of Gibraltar; but by no possibility could they pass up the coast of Labrador into Davis's Strait in the very teeth of a current which we shall presently prove to be perpetual.

Equally difficult would it be to explain, in any other way, the situation of another log of mahogany picked up by Admiral Lowenorn in 1786, when sent out to re-discover the east coast of Old Greenland. From the admiral's manuscript journal in our possession, it appears that in lat. 65° 11', long. 35° 8" W. of Paris, the land then in sight, at the distance of about sixty miles, but the intermediate space covered apparently with fields and mountains of ice, he discovered a floating log of wood of such enormous size that they were unable to hoist it on board, until they had sawn it in two. Some sea gulls were perched on this log. It was a remarkable circumstance,' says the admiral, 'that it was mahoganywood, which is generally too heavy to float in water, but the wood in question was so much perforated by the worms, to the very centre, that its specific gravity might probably have been diminished.' The situation in which the mahogany was discovered was far more ' remarkable' than its swimming. The current was invariably found (as it always has been) setting from the north-east and parallel to the coast of Greenland; and if the log in question was not brought down from the arctic sea by the same current which brings so much drift-wood to the shores of Spitzbergen, Green

* One of the grounds assigned by Wood for his attempting the discovery of a northeast passage was that Goulden told him all the drift-wood found on the shores of Greenland (Spitzbergen) was eaten to the very heart by the sea-worm, and that it must therefore have come from a hot country-from Jedzo, Japan, or some country thereabouts." Harris's Voyages.

land,

land, Jan Mayen's Island,* Iceland, and the coast of Labrador, we know not by what chance or operation it arrived at the spot where it was picked up.

To prove that the southerly current along the coast of Labrador to Newfoundland is not confined to the summer months, though from the expansion of the polar sea its velocity must be greater in those months, it might be sufficient to quote the authority of Captain Buchan, who for four or five years was continually in that neighbourhood; but that a circumstance of so much importance may not rest on the assertion of a single individual, however respectable, a few facts may be stated which will put the question beyond all doubt.-Captain Beaufort fell in with ice-bergs floating to the southward on the 4th October, in lat. 46°.-Lieutenant Parry, on the 2d April, in lat. 44°21'; the Fly sloop of war, after being cut out of the harbour-ice for nearly two miles entered the Greenland floating ice, and drifted in the midst of it round Cape Race for three days, before she got clear; and in lat. 49° fell in with two islands of ice: this was at the end of March. The Grace packet from Halifax, when in lat. 41° 51′, long. 50° 53′, on the 28th March last, had the wind from the north so excessively cold during the whole day and following night, that Captain Vivian concluded they could not be far from ice. Accordingly, about eight in the morning of the 29th, several large islands of ice were observed stretching in an east and west direction for more than seven leagues, several of them appearing to be from 200 to 250 feet above the surface. On the whole of that day the packet was running at the rate of seven miles an hour, and at the end of it had but just lost sight of the ice.

The brig Ann, of Poole, William Dayment, master, left the harbour of Greenspond in Newfoundland on the morning of the 19th of January, 1818; the same evening she got among ice, and proceeded about forty miles, when, at day-light the next morning, the Captain found himself completely beset, and no opening to be seen in any direction from the mast-head. In this state he continued for fifteen days, drifting with the ice about sixty miles, in a direction S. E. by E. or about four miles in twenty-four hours. The ice was now become very heavy, being about fourteen feet above the surface, and about twenty large mountainous islands or ice-bergs in sight. With this ice the ship drove until she was in lat. 44° 37′ and about three hundred miles to the eastward of Cape Race, when, on the 17th of February, she got clear through the only opening that appeared round the whole horizon from east to south-east, all the rest of the circle affording one solid compact

The quantity brought to this island alone is said by Crantz to spread over a surface equat to the base of the whole island.

body

body of ice as far as the eye could reach. The vessel had been shut up for nine and twenty days, in the last fourteen of which she drifted from lat. 46° 57′ to lat. 44° 37', about two hundred and eighty miles, or twenty miles a day S. E. by E., tremendous gales of wind blowing the whole time from the west to the north-west. Dayment says that, in the course of the passage, he saw more than a hundred very large islands of solid blue ice, known to the traders by the name of the northern or Greenland ice.

The brig Funchal, of Greenock, sailed from St. John's in Newfoundland, on the 17th of January of the present year. About fifteen miles to the westward of this port, she fell in with a field of ice coming down from the northward, about eight miles in breadth, and extending to the northward beyond the reach of sight. Having cleared this and proceeded westerly about two hundred and fifty miles, on the 20th, in lat. 47°, she encountered a still more extensive field floating to the southward, in the midst of which was an immense ice-berg; she got free from this, though not without difficulty, and brought with her a gale of wind with snow, sleet and rain, the whole way to Scotland.*

It may here be mentioned as a fact corroborative of the very extensive displacement of ice-fields and ice-bergs, that for the last three years the Hudson's Bay Company have had either one or two of their ships stopped, in their homeward-bound voyage, by the ice brought down from the northward, in the early part of September, which has obliged them to winter in the bay: a circumstance, which had only happened twice in more than a century—once about fifty years ago, and again in the year 1811.

From the vast floating bodies of ice, seen by the several vessels in the Atlantic, we infer, 1. that the dislocation in the arctic seas has been very general, whatever the cause may be, and that it still continues; 2. that the floating and thawing of such vast bodies of ice in a low latitude have been the causes of those extraordinary gales of wind from the west and south-west, accompanied with sleet and snow; and produced those storms and inundations which have visited not only these islands, but a great part of Europe, during the first three months of the year 1818; and that, unfortunately for us, so long as such fields and islands of ice continue to be carried away from the polar seas, and melted in the Atlantic, we have nothing to expect but a raw, moist, and chilly atmosphere, with westerly winds, both summer and winter; and 3. what

For the first of these facts we are obliged to B. Lester, Esq. M.P. for Poole; for the second to Captain Buchan, received by him from a passenger.

The cold on the eastern coast of America was unprecedented during the whole of the last two years. In Virginia scarcely a night without frost even in summer-in New Orleans