A Short American Tramp in the Fall of 1864
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?*k--v : llgf £ ^o^^/l^c^'. /.e,2fl /r—z '/ j£-2s? ^^ ^ <^y5stst 4 Ox tin- 2d of June 1863 a photograph was taken of the Harboiu of St. John's. The apparent sea-horizon, distant ten miles or so from the spot, was hidden by a solid raft of pack-ice in which large bergs were fixed ; the narrows and the harbour were lull of broken bits. On the beach great rounded blocks were stranded. By drawing perspective lines to the horizon from these, past Fort Waldegrave, dimensions can be measured in the picture, for all photographs are drawn to BCale. Many of the stranded blocks equalled the size of the gunners' cottages. The frontispiece i- faithfully reduced from the photograph by an aide artist, but no copy can express the detail of the sun-picture. On the left is a Hake at the foot of Signal-hill. On the top of that hill, which nearly equals the height of the opposite hill on the right of the picture, fresh glacial striae, at a height of 540 feet, poinl out to 'Mi tiie sky-line of the hill to the right, perched blocks ran he made- out in the photograph, with a good lens, Thej are blocks of native rock poised upon glaciated weathered surfaces. They are too minute to he shown in a woodcut, but the camera found them out and copied them, as it did a small berg ten miles off on the horizon. GLACIAL STKI.-E COPIED BY RUBBINGS. Skyline of Signal-hill left. // ight. Bearing true). 540 feet. West to East. 360 .. West 27o .. X. 85 West Hollow iieai- Quidi Vidi. ISO tret. WeSt Hill-face beyond Quidi Vidi, behind the coast-range, and in the rock-groove. 360 feet. X. 42 W., and X. 80° W. "-• These last seem to ran up-hill ^ out of the s I m Wm A SHORT AMERICAN TRAMP IN THE FALL OF 1864 THE EDITOR OF 'LIFE IN NORMANDY EDINBURGH: EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS MDCCCLXV AN AMERICAN TRAMP. » CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. On the fourteenth of June, boys, we got under weigh In the bold Princess Royal bound for Americay, And fifteen bold sailors made our companee, To the east and the west, and across the salt sea. Oh, we'll go a cruising ; oh, we'll go a cruising ; Oh, we'll go a cruising across the salt sea. Sea Song. Anxious to see a new country, and to test a glacial theory formed and matured in Switzerland, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Iceland, the writer of the following pages started for a cruise in July 1864. An ice-laden ocean-current now describes a south- west curve from Spitsbergen, lat. 80°, to Cape Farewell in Greenland, lat. 60°. There, in the latitude of the Shetlands, it eddies northwards, and turning south- wards again it coasts Labrador to 52°. Part of it flows south-west through the Straits of Belleisle, near the lati- — Z AN AMEBICAM TRAMP. tude of the Straits of Dover ; the main stream Hows southwards outside of Newfoundland, over the banks, and there it crosses the Gulf Stream about 46°. The tail of this arctic current carries icebergs, 100 feet high and a quarter of a mile long, to lat. 36° 10' at least, as the following quotations show : « On the 27th of April 1829, Captain Couthony passed, in lat, 36° 10' K, long. 39° W. (probably south of the Gulf Stream), an iceberg estimated to be a quar- ter of a mile long and from 80 to 100 feet high. It was much wasted in its upper portion, which was worn and broken into the most fanciful shapes.' ' In 1831, at daylight on the 17th of August, lat. 3G° 20' N., long. 67° 45' W., upon the southern edge of the Gulf Stream, he fell in with several small icebergs in such proximity to each other as to leave little doubt of their being fragments of a large one, which, weakened by the high temperature of the surrounding water, had fallen asunder dining a strong gale which had prevailed from the south-east,'* The icebergs which float in this great Atlantic stream are portions of glaciers which grow in Greenland at the * Silliman's Journal, vol. xliii. 1842, quoted in a memoir nil dangers in the Atlantic; eleventh edition, p. 15. New York. E. and Q. W. Blunt, 1849. CAPTAIN COUTHOXY S OBSERVATIONS. 3 nearest, and they are often loaded with moraines, that is to say, with large stones and clay. ' In September 1822, Captain Couthony saw an ice- berg aground on the eastern edge of the grand bank, in lat. 43° 18' K, long. 48° 30' W. Sounding three miles inside of it the depth was found to be 105 fathoms (630 feet.)' 1 In the month of August 1827, the same observer, while crossing the banks in lat. 46° 30', long. 48° W., passed within less than a mile of a large iceberg which was stranded in between 80 and 90 fathoms (540 feet) water. He was so near as to perceive distinctly large fragments of rock and quantities of earthy matter im- bedded in the side of the iceberg, and to see from the fore-yards that the water for at least a quarter of a mile round it was full of mud stirred up from the bottom by the violent rolling and crushing of the mass.'* To the memoir above quoted a small chart of the Atlantic is added, on which spots are noted where ice has been seen, and the fact recorded in the ' Nautical Magazine/ Purdy's ' Memoir of the Atlantic,' news- papers, or other publications, chiefly since 1832. It is there shewn that floes, fields, and bergs occur most frequently between long. 44° and 52° "VV., occasionally eastward of 40°, and westward of 60°. This region is * The mud was probably moraine mud. 4 AN AMERICAN TRAMP. never wholly free of heavy ice, and it is sometimes thickly crowded for great distances between lat. 40° and 50°, and further north. Such facts, picked up in a course of reading, a series of observations made in Europe dur- ing twenty years, a set of experiments, and a train of thought, had led to the belief that an arctic current once flowed S.W. down the Baltic and over the British Isles, and that such currents were amply sufficient to account for many glacial phenomena in Europe and elsewhere. Sea-shells of arctic types occiir at great elevations in Western Europe. One bed occurs above 3000 feet on Snowdon.* Horizontal glacial striae also occur on the tops and shoulders of isolated hills in the British Isles at all elevations, up to 3000 feet, and their direction is generally NE. and S.W., or thereby. Shells and high striae teU of sea-\v;itcr and heavy moving ice, and on them a theory was built. As large islands of ice are now carried by currents to latitudes which cor- respond to Gibraltar in Europe, and to Richmond and Cairo in North America, similar currents may have carried drift to any spot north of these latitudes, and lower than old sea-margins. It' ever America was submerged, and the existing arctic cur- * Times, Sept. 20,1864. Letter from Mr. Baumgarten. 'A conglomerate of shells, and casts of them, with sand and pebbles.1 rent then continued its present south-west course, the 8] r of it ought to be found along a south-west curve produced from the Straits of Belleisle. So it ap- peared ; but this theory had to be tested. The plan formed to test this ' glacial theory' was first to study the ways of icebergs and the climate, on the coast of Labrador, in British latitudes ; then to follow the spoor overland in Xorth America as high up on hills, and as far south as possible, and to learn facts from the works of others, and from all available sources. Icebergs were seen, and a spoor was followed to St. 39°. Louis, on the Mississippi ; there it ended, about lat. The broad trail was crossed westwards at lat. 44° and 45° about lat. 39° and 41°, and it was fol- ; eastwards lowed northwards to Boston, westwards to Albany, and southwards to Xew York It confirmed the opinion formed in Europe. While thus spooring for some thousands of miles, other things were noticed. A badly-kept journal may perhaps interest glacialists and amuse readers who, like the writer, delight in wandering to and fro under some pre- tence or other. The first step in such a trip ought to be an attempt to gain some notion of the general shape of the country, its physical geography and geology, so far as they seem to bear on the subject to be studied. — AN AMERICAN TIIAMIV American Physical Geography. The following are a few facts noticed, picked up by the way, and gathered from various sources : The Atlantic coast of North America is the low shriving edge of a broad slope. It is from 50 to 200 miles wide, and from 300 to 500 feet high at the base of the Alleghanies. These mountains form a chain 1300 miles long. The highest point is Black Dome, North Carolina, 6707 feet. The ridges are generally continuous for long distances, and run from N.E. to S.W. They are more broken and worn to the north. Gaps in the White Mountains are about 2000 feet high, and the highest point is Mount Washington, 6288, ac- cording to Guyot* From the low sea-coast, westwards to the mountains, from the head of the Bay of Fundy to the 1'otoinac the slope is generally a rolling plateau covered with drift.