Year: 1870

We clip the following from Harper's
Udgdzi"e for July, from Jacob Abbott's
ocean Steamer :"


The truth is that, Notwithstanding the
extraordinary degree of exemption from
disaster and calamity which has been at
tained in the navigation of the northern
Atlantic, through the vast advances
which have been made in modern times
in nautical science and skill, there is
probably no other thoroughfare of COM
merce or of human intercommunicatiOn
on the globe SO beset with danger and
difficulties as the voyage from New York
to Liverpool. The Gulf Stream brings a
current of warm water fifty miles wide
and thousand feet deep-and flowing
at the ordinary rate of the current of a
river--from the tropical seas, and pours
it out in vast expanding mass over and
beyond the Banks of Newfoundland,
where it turns off to the eastward, and
finally loses itself in the northern seas :
while, to tue westward of it, a counter
current coming down from BafiD's Bay
a current of nearly equal magnitude and
iorce-pours into it a stream of icebergs
ice-hOes, and ice-cold water. The effects
of this confluence are, beneath the water
the accumulation of vast deposits of sand
and rocky debris brought down by the
ice, and in the atmosphere above all al
most perpetual succession of fogs and
mists and driving rains, accompanied by
gales and squalls, and every other posi-
Die meteorological commo ion.


The region most disturbed by the con-
tlict between these opposing forces and
temperatures is on the hither side of the
Atlantic, and affects chiefly the first hall
OF the voyage; and the danger, more
over, is the greatest at that season of the
year which would on other accounts be
the most convenient and the most
agreeable time for making the trip, name
ly, in the early months of summer, The
ice-hoes break up, and icebergs are de
tached from the great Greenland glaciers
crowding out from the land, in the early
summer of one season and as they re-
quire about year for their twelve or fit
teen hundred miles voyage, they DO not
reach the track of the ocean steamers
until the early summer of the next. They
DRIFT very slowly at last, and melt very
gradually under the feeble radiation o.
even June and July suns in the latitude
of Labrador. Some portions both of the
foes and icebergs reach as far south a:
the banks of Newfoundland, but few &C
much farther south than this. Their ad
vance ceases here, partly because tht
force of the current by which they arr
brought down becomes well nigh eX
hausted, and partly because the masses
of ice become, by this time, SO diminished
and so weakened by the increasing heat
both of the latitude and the season, tina
they are easily beaten to pieces by th'
waves and Dissolved. Sometimes, howev
er, mountains of ice come down of sucl
prodigious size that it is long before the,
entirely disappear Captain Price in
formed us that on one of his voyages b
passed two immense icebergs, and on hi
return voyage, after sailing nearly titteel
hundred miles to and fro, and maxim,
The usual stay in port, he passed then
again. They had dritted during the in
terim about forty miles. They had d


minished somewhat IN size, but the


were of such magnitude still, and thei
forms were 30 peculiar, that their ident


ty could not be mistaken.