Icebergs and bewildering fogs, as has been already said, are a large element of danger in the St. Lawrence route. The passengers who sailed with me on the _Lake Superior_, from Montreal on July 1st, 1896, will not soon forget the magnificent display of icebergs which they witnessed on the Sunday following. From early morning until midnight, for a distance of more than 250 miles, the ship’s course lay through an uninterrupted succession of icebergs—a procession, it might be called, on a grand scale of masses of ice in all manner of fantastic shapes and of dazzling whiteness—travelling to their watery graves in the great Gulf Stream of the south. Mountains of ice, some of them might be called. On one of them a grisly bear was alleged to have been seen sulkily moving to and fro, as if meditating how, when and where his romantic voyage was to come to an end. The day was calm and cloudless—a perfect day for such a marvellous exhibition. It might have been otherwise, and how different may be imagined from reading what appeared in the English papers a few weeks later—the account of a ship’s narrow escape from destruction in this identical locality: [Illustration: H. M. YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT,” 1855. 2,470 tons; 2,980 h. p.: speed. 16.8 knots; armament, 2 six-pounders; crew, 151 men.] “STRUCK AN ICEBERG.—The SS. _Etolia_ on her voyage from Montreal to Bristol narrowly escaped destruction from collision with an iceberg twenty-four hours after leaving the eastern end of Belle Isle straits. A dense fog had set in, the lookout was doubled, and the engines slowed; presently the fog lifted, but only to come down again thicker than ever. In a very short time the lookout called out, ‘Ice ahead!’ The engines were promptly stopped, then reversed at full speed. Meanwhile the towering monster bears down on the ship and in a few seconds is on top of it. It was a huge berg, rising high above the masts of the steamer, which it struck with such a crash that some three hundred tons of ice in huge pieces came down on the forecastle. Fortunately most of it rebounded into the sea, but some forty or fifty tons remained on the ship’s deck. The ship trembled under the blow from stem to stern; her bows were smashed in, but the leakage was confined to the fore-peak. In this battered condition the _Etolia_ lay without a movement of the engines for thirty-six hours until the fog cleared, when Captain Evans had the satisfaction of proceeding on his course and bringing his passengers and crew safely into Bristol harbour.” A still more serious disaster was reported on August 25th of the same year (1896):