Among all the dangers and discomforts of seafaring life on the Atlantic, there is nothing a captain so much dreads as contact with the great mountains of ice that come floating down the Newfoundland coast from the Arctic Ocean. Fog, rain, snow, and blizzards may be fought and overpowered, but it is seldom that an ocean liner survives a collision with an iceberg. Some of these encounters with the “Arctic travellers,” as they are called, are most thrilling. Upon even the darkest night the white apparel of these giant ghosts can be detected in time to avert disaster; but when the fog is thick across the bows of the steamer, then it is that the nerves of a captain and crew are tested.

One of the most appalling collisions with an iceberg was in May, 1876, when off the coast of Labrador the Caledonia, with eighty-two souls on board, came in contact with an unwelcome wanderer. Seventy-one of the passengers and crew went down with the vessel under the shadow of the berg. The remaining eleven converted their grim assailant into a tower of refuge. For three days and three nights they lodged in a crevice of the berg, keeping life in their bodies by eating a seal which they killed, until they were ultimately rescued by the crew of a fishing-boat that passed by on the morning of the fourth day.

An even more painful disaster occurred off Cape Race in the year 1885. Seventy-four people were on board the Vaillant when she left the shores of Brittany on her way to Ste. Pierre, a small French possession to the South of Newfoundland. All went well until Cape Race was reached, when she crashed into an iceberg and sank in less than fifteen minutes. Only twelve of the crew were able to save themselves from the fate of the sixty-two who sank with the vessel. These twelve managed to escape in two boats, but they were adrift on the ocean for over a week. As they had neither time nor opportunity to save food or clothing from the stricken vessel, some of them died of starvation, and their bodies were eaten to sustain life in their comrades. It was bitterly cold, and so their number soon became reduced to four. When these four survivors were picked up, the frost had played such havoc with their hands and feet that amputation was the only means of saving their lives.

The following account of a similar disaster in the Arctic seas is even more thrilling than the above. It is from the pen of Mr. P.T. McGrath, a Newfoundland journalist. “In 1881 the Greely Expedition, sent into the Arctic regions by the United States Government, established itself at Lady Franklin Bay for a three years’ sojourn. Two years later the Newfoundland sealer Proteus was sent north with stores and supplies to be landed at Cape Sabine, at the head of Melville Bay, for the use of the explorers when they retreated to that spot. The ship, however, was pushed into the ice in that bay by the orders of the inexperienced American officer in charge of the expedition, and she was crushed so that she sank within an hour, not an article aboard being saved, and the crew having themselves to make a three-hundred-mile voyage in open boats to South Greenland, where a collier picked them up and brought them home again. When the explorers came south in October they found themselves faced with the certainty of absolute starvation and the terrible prospect that not a man in the party would escape the worst of deaths, for they were marooned on a desolate Arctic headland, without shelter, food, or firing, with not a human being for hundreds of miles, and absolutely no hope of relief under the most favourable outlook for six or eight months. It is impossible to give anything like an idea of the terrible tortures these thirty-one humans endured during this desperate winter. After they had consumed their scanty supplies which they brought with them in their boats from the north, they had to maintain life by means of shellfish caught with their naked hands along the shore, and then to make an unpalatable yet acceptable mess of their sealskin boots and garments, until at last, as the less robust of the party died, the others kept themselves alive by the dreadful alternative of cannibalism. When the two strongest of the Newfoundland seal fleet, purchased by the American Government, and equipped at the cost of $250,000, were pushed north the next spring, at a date earlier than the Arctic Circle had ever been entered before, only six of the party remained alive to tell the tale of a fight against death absolutely unique in the records of marine adventure in any part of the known world.”

During the year 1909 the icebergs off the Newfoundland coast were more numerous than for many years previously. Some scientists have attributed it to an icequake in the Arctic Regions, which broke up the vast continent of ice there. The great boulders having gained their freedom, they were brought down towards the south on the bosom of the Arctic current. From Cabot Tower, on Signal Hill, near St. John’s, as many as two hundred bergs were seen to pass by in a majestic procession during one day, and this in the month of June. Lest it may be thought that the air in St. John’s would be of a frigid nature during this procession, it is only just to say that the weather was as charming as June weather in England. It was at this time that the Allan liner Mongolian was jammed in the ice outside St. John’s Harbour for several days, and the people of St. John’s, for the first time in fifty years, saw the novel spectacle of passengers descending from the liner and walking across the ice to the shore.

Another species of iceberg with which navigators have to contend is the “growler,” a berg which just peers above the water, and carries its greatest bulk below. Sometimes it is impossible to detect these, however keen the lookout may be, until the captain experiences a bump at the bow, and finds that an iron plate has been smashed in by the force of the impact.