In the month of May, of the year 1814, I witnessed a tremendous scene. While navigating amidst the most ponderous ice which the Greenland Sea presents, in the prospect of making our escape from a state of _besetment_, our progress was unexpectedly arrested by an isthmus of ice, about a mile in breadth, formed by the coalition of the point of an immense field on the north, with that of an aggregation of floes on the south. To the north field we moored the ship, in the hope of the ice separating in this place. I then quitted the ship, and travelled over the ice to the point of collision, to observe the state of the bar, which now prevented our release. I immediately discovered that the two points had but recently met, that already a prodigious mass of rubbish had been squeezed upon the top, and that the motion had not abated. The fields continued to overlay each other with a majestic motion, producing a noise resembling that of complicated machinery, or distant thunder. The pressure was so immense, that numerous fissures were occasioned, and the ice repeatedly rent beneath my feet. In one of the fissures, I found the snow on the level three and a half feet deep, and the ice upwards of twelve. In one place, hummocks had been thrown up to the height of twenty feet from the surface of the field, and at least twenty-five feet from the level of the water; they extended fifty or sixty yards in length, and fifteen in breadth, forming a mass of about two thousand tons in weight. The majestic, unvaried movement of the ice, the singular noise by which it was accompanied, the tremendous power exerted, and the wonderful effects produced—were calculated to excite in the mind of the most careless spectator admiration of Him with whom “the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” The term _icebergs_ has commonly been applied to the glaciers occurring in Spitzbergen, Greenland, and other arctic countries. It is also as commonly extended to the large peaks, mountains, or islets of ice that are found floating in the sea. It is the latter kind of icebergs we purpose to describe.