“The weaker field is crushed with an awful noise: sometimes the destruction is mutual. Pieces of huge dimensions and weight are not unfrequently piled upon the top, to the height of twenty or thirty feet, whilst doubtless a proportionate quantity is depressed beneath. The view of those stupendous effects in _safety_, exhibits a picture sublimely grand, but where there is danger of being overwhelmed, terror and dismay must be the predominant feelings. The whale-fishers at all times require unremitting vigilance to secure their safety, but scarcely in any situation, so much as when navigating amidst those fields. In foggy weather they are particularly dangerous, as their motion cannot then be distinctly observed. It may easily be imagined, that the strongest ship can no more withstand the shock of the contact of two fields, than a sheet of paper can stop a musket ball. Numbers of vessels, since the establishment of the fishery, have been thus destroyed. Some have been thrown upon the ice; some have had their hulls completely torn open; and others have been buried beneath the heaped fragments of the ice. “In the year 1804, I had a good opportunity of witnessing the effects produced by the lesser masses in motion. Passing between two fields of bay-ice, about a foot in thickness, they were observed rapidly to approach each other, and before our ship could pass the strait, they met, with a velocity of three or four miles per hour; the one overlaid the other, and presently covered many acres of surface. The ship proving an obstacle to the course of the ice, it squeezed up on both sides, shaking her in a dreadful manner, and producing a loud grinding, or lengthened and acute tremulous noise, accordingly as the degree of pressure was diminished or increased, until it had risen as high as the deck. After about two hours, the velocity was diminished to a state of rest; and, soon afterwards, the two sheets of ice receded from each other nearly as rapidly as they had before advanced. The ship, in this case, did not receive any injury; but had the ice been only half a foot thicker, she would probably have been wrecked.