The Emporia news. [volume] (Emporia, Kan.) 1859-1881, 1870-08-05
PERILS OF A VOYAGE.

The truth is that, notwithstanding
the extraordinary degree of exemption
from disaster and calamity which has
been attained in the navigation of the
northern Atlantic through the advances
which have been made in modern times
in nautical science and skill, there is
probably no other great thoroughfare
of commerce or of human intercommu-
nication on the globe so beset with dan
ger and difficulties as the voyage from
New York to Liverpool. The Gulf
Stream brings current of warm wa
ter fifty miles wide and a thousand feet
down-and flowing at the ordinary rate
of the current of river-from the
tropical seas, and pours it out in vast
expanding mass over and beyond the
Bays of Newfoundland, where it turns
off to the eastward, and finally loses it
self in the northern seas while, to the
westward of it, a counter current COM
ing down from Baffins Bay-a current
of nearly equal magnitude and force
pours into it stream of icebergs, ice
foes, and ice-cold water. The effects
of this confluence are, beneath the &C
emulation of vast deposits of sand and
rocky debris brought down by the ice,
and in the atmosphere above an almost
perpetual succession of fogs and mists
and driving rains, accompanied by gales
and squalls, and every other possible
meteorological commotion.
The region most disturbed by the
conflict between those opposing forces
and temperatures is on the hither side
the Atlantic, and affects chiefly the first
half of the voyage; and the danger,
moreover, is the greatest at that season
of the year which would on other ac-
counts be the most convenient and the
most agreeable time for making the trip
namely, in the early months of sum-
mer. The icefioes break up, and ice
bergs are detached from the great
Greenland glaciers crowding out from
the land, in the early summer of one
season and as they require about a year
for their twelve or fifteen hundred mile
voyage, they do not reach the track of
the ocean steamers until the carly sum-
mer of the next. They drift very slow
ly at last, and melt very gradually I'M
der the feeble radiation of even June
and July suns in the latitude of Labra-
dor. Some portions both of the foes
and of the icebergs reach as far south
as the banks of Newfoundland, but few
go much farther south than this. Their
advance ceases here, partly because the
force of the current by which they are
brought down becomes well-nigh ex-
hausted, and partly because the masses
of ice become by this time so dimin-
ished and so weakened by the increas-
ing heat, both of the latitude and the
season, that they are easily beaten to
pieces by the waves and dissolved.
Sometimes, however, mountains of ice
come down of such prodigious size that
it is long before they entirely disap-
pear. Captain Price informed us that
on one of his voyages he passed two
immense icebergs, and ON his return
voyage, after sailing fifteen hundred
miles to and fro, and making the usual
stay in port, he passed them again.
They had drifted during the interim
about forty miles. They diminished
somewhat in size, but they were of such
magnitude still, and their form so pecu-
liar, that their identity could not be
mistaken. From t'the Ocean Steam
er, by Jacob Abbott, in Hdrper's Mag
1 SNsa n In