Nearly concurrent with the publication of this article in the Naval Institute Proceedings looms an event annual in its appearance, yet gravely significant as it casts a shadow of possible danger across the paths of North Atlantic shipping. Icebergs constitute one of the greatest natural dangers which seamen of our northern seas have had to combat from earliest recorded times. Seventeen years ago the principal maritime nations of the world joined to establish a most needful humanitarian service—an effective guard against icebergs.
The International Ice Patrol has grown to be one of the most important units among the many varied ones comprising the U. S. Coast Guard. The task of insuring safety to the main arteries of commerce on the most frequently traveled ocean of the world, becomes a trust of great weight and responsibility. Modern attainments in the shipbuilding art have placed in commission enormous hulls, aggregating half a hundred thousand tons, costing five to fifteen million dollars, and driven at railroad speeds of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. On board one of these new-day leviathans travel three to four thousand people, as many souls as constitute a fair-sized village on shore. Fifteen hundred to two thousand steamships, ten billions of property, and a million lives ply past, or through the iceberg zone every spring, and place their dependence on the alertness of the Ice Patrol. The Coast Guard, mindful of these risks, details two of its most efficient first-class cutters to this work, manned by officers and crew well seasoned and experienced in the knowledge of ice conditions in the North Atlantic. One ship is always on guard, night and day, ready at the place where danger appears most likely to break through, advising all approaching steamers by wireless as to the latest positions of the ice. Hundreds of inquiries are answered, and a week seldom passes that some vessel is not warned that her course will carry her into real danger.
About 350 bergs, on the average, invade the North Atlantic south of Newfoundland every year. The main ice stream after pushing southward along the Labrador coast divides in the offing of Cape Race, Newfoundland; one branch curls to the south- westward but does not extend far; a second branch swerves offshore into the basin just south of Flemish Cap; the third, and the most dangerous ice stream, discharges directly into the Gulf Stream near the Tail of the Grand Bank. A perusal of the early sailing-ship records impresses one with the great number of casualties to those vessels which pursued great-circle courses laid across the latitudes infested by icebergs. Strange to relate, however, the risk of collisions between east-bound and west-bound ships at first elicited more anxiety than did the dangers of the ice. An unusually appalling disaster in which three hundred people lost their lives off Cape Race resulted in a universal adoption of separated lane routes. In 1875 the Cunard Steamship Company, by virtue of its seniority, ordered its shipmasters to follow lane routes, the west-bound sixty miles north of the east-bound, and on account of the danger of icebergs, the United States routes were run to a point just south of the Grand Bank on the fiftieth meridian. The U. S. Hydrographic Office in 1891 urged further lane-route recommendations, and in 1898 the Transatlantic Track Conference was formed, the transatlantic tracks assuming practically the same position that are enforced today, and familiar to us all. The conference is composed of the principal United States and European steamship companies, in which the Cunard Line exerts a guiding influence. The tracks are shifted southward during the spring on the advice of various steamship masters, the Ice Patrol, or the U. S. Hydrographic Office, and in accordance with the severity of the particular season. The extra-southerly lane routes, “A,” which are effective in a bad ice year, lengthen the voyage between Europe and the United States by only fifty miles.
If the icebergs always remained within their normal limits, then nothing further would be necessary to insure sufficient safety to all ships, but unfortunately this is not the case. On the night of April 14-15, 1912, the White Star liner Titanic, on her maiden trip to the United States, struck an iceberg off the Tail of the Grand Bank and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives. The toll of 300 lives early in the nineteenth century preceded the adoption of prescribed transatlantic-lane routes; the great marine disaster of the twentieth century resulted in the establishment of the International Ice Patrol. Fourteen maritime nations gathered in London, 1913-1914, at a Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea, and provided among other things for a continuous patrol of the eastern, southern, and western limits of floating ice during the danger season, a year-round service of ice observation, and the destruction of derelicts east of Cape Sable’s meridian. It was contemplated that two vessels could manage the three services, except in the iceberg season, when both ships would concentrate on this feature. The convention recognized also the necessity and value of pursuing scientific research, in order to solve the natural problems. The Coast Guard for several years has devoted a generous share of effort to scientific investigation, and much encouraging progress has been made.
Immediately following the Titanic disaster, upon recommendation of the U. S. Hydrographic Office, two Navy cruisers—Birmingham and Chester—patrolled the ice-infested waters off Newfoundland for the remainder of the 1912 season. Circumstances prevented the Navy from continuing the protection in 1913, but the Coast Guard assigned the Seneca and Miami.
The international convention, naturally, at its London meeting, turned to the United States as the most logical government to continue with the ice patrol work. The expenses are totaled each year and divided among the nations a party to the agreement, each paying a quota based on its proportional ocean ship tonnage. President Wilson appointed the Interdepartmental Board on International Ice Observation, Ice Patrol and Derelict Destruction Service, composed of the following members: Commandant Coast Guard (chairman); hydrographer, U. S. Navy; chief, U. S. Weather Bureau; director, U. S. Bureau of Standards; and deputy commissioner, U. S. Bureau of Fisheries. The board meets annually; shapes the general policies of the service; and lays down a program for the ensuing year. The Coast Guard is the arm of our government which actually carries out the Ice Patrol with its ships and personnel, and the Hydrographic Office cooperates to give publicity to its operations and information. The Coast Guard every year publishes an Ice Patrol Bulletin consisting of fifty to one hundred printed pages, containing a complete report on the work carried out during the current ice season. Parts are devoted to such subjects as ice scouting, the behavior of the ice, and to detailed notes and discussions of a meteorological and oceanographic nature.
The work has two main aspects. First and foremost is the practical task of keeping in touch with the ice limits as they change from day to day, and week to week, and placing this information in the hands of all approaching ship masters as quickly as possible. This requires not only an active and intelligent program of search, but an efficient system of radio communication as well. The ice often is distributed over a very wide area, and this combined with protracted periods of fog, renders it impossible for the patrol always to cover the ground in the time allotted. Recourse is had to reports of ice sighted, and collected by radio, from all ships in the region, and so the Ice Patrol becomes a veritable clearing house of information. The other feature of the work centers on carrying out a program of scientific observation which will bring a clearer insight of the ice problems, and lead to a determination of the most effective methods to protect life and property. The scientific work has dealt mainly with subjects of a meteorological or oceanographic character.
The Coast Guard for several years has been training some of its own officers in the foregoing sciences. One of the interesting problems which has been investigated is the cause of the great annual variations in the number of icebergs that drift south of Newfoundland. Harvard University and the British Meteorological Office have contributed valuable assistance to this research, in the hope that the severity of future ice seasons can be forecasted. There is a great fluctuation; for example, in 1912, over 1,200 bergs invaded the North Atlantic, while in 1924 the total did not exceed fifteen. It has been found that the system of winds prevailing over the northwestern North Atlantic during the months of December to March exerts an important control over the spring and summer crop of field ice and icebergs. The period December to March will be characterized by a distribution of atmospheric pressure centered near Iceland, as a rule, either higher than normal in light ice years, or lower than normal in heavy ice years. The wind, however, in this scheme acts to little appreciable degree directly on the bergs themselves, 'but because of the great frictional effect it drives extensive ice fields about. An abnormal predominance of northwesterly winds, therefore, over the Greenland-North America region, during the period December to March, brings forth an enormous amount of pack ice blockading the Labrador and Newfoundland coast lines. The pack tends to fend the icebergs off the coast, and these, prevented from stranding, find their way southward in the icy current to the Gateway of the Atlantic. It is believed, in fact, that if field ice did not blockade the coast of Laborador and Newfoundland for this critical period, no iceberg menace, as we know it today, would exist. The Coast Guard, by measuring the atmospheric-pressure differences between Belle Isle, Newfoundland, and Ivigtut, Greenland (a line across the prevailing air current), has discovered a means of forecasting the approximate number of bergs which will appear south of Newfoundland in April, May, and June. We lacked, in 1912, the full realization of that great iceberg invasion which brought such a tragedy, but it is probable that in future years we shall be forewarned.
The strong northwesterlies drive great quantities of sea ice southward. They also are a great factor, the Ice Patrol believes, in characterizing the famous Labrador current, because its seasonal fluctuations cannot be entirely explained as caused by an overflow from the melting ice in the Arctic. The winds through their frictional propagation amass great quantities of the surface layers against the coast line of Baffin Island and Labrador. The old adage, “water seeks its own level,” is true here, the excess tending to flow offshore towards a lower level, but the effect of earth rotation relegates actual movement to a set paralleling the strand, otherwise more commonly known as the famous Labrador current. The ice region south and east of Newfoundland in March, when the patrol ships inaugurate the guard, is still within the grip of steep atmospheric gradients and boisterous winter gales. Strong northwesterly winds and gales prevail in winter and less intense southwesterly winds in late spring and summer. These two types of circulation are interrupted, especially in winter, by low- pressure centers moving eastward, the mean paths of which cross Newfoundland and contribute stormy conditions to the Grand Bank’s area. It easily can be imagined that in early season the scouting operations of the cutters are carried on with great difficulty, amidst continually veering gales that lash the waters into a veritable fury. A decided change in the circulation of the atmosphere about the middle to the latter part of April transforms the ice-region weather. North America and North Atlantic exchange temperature characters, expanding the “Azorean High’’ and lowering the pressure over the land masses to the west, causing a warm southwesterly air stream to flow over the icy waters around Newfoundland, and bringing a fog sheet that often does not lift for weeks at a time. The fact that the region so enshrouded by fog is also one most infested by bergs, greatly increases the danger of colliding with ice.
The first ice which appears south of Newfoundland, transported there on the Labrador current, are the fields and floes that have formed in shelf waters northward along the western side of Davis Strait ; especially productive is the region of Fox Basin and northern Hudson Bay. These embayments are spacious but shallow and thus afford most favorable conditions for chilling the water columns and making ice. Many of the flat basins are subject to great tidal ranges, which continually tend to break up the sheets of new ice, allowing them to drift seaward to augment the Arctic pack. Ice appears at the mouth of Fox Channel and Hudson Strait in October and November, whence it makes its way rapidly southward along the Labrador coasts, spreading over the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia shelves from February to April. Northern Newfoundland finds in the arrival of the pack ice an annual event of real economic importance. Many sealing steamers manned by Newfoundland fishermen set forth from St. John’s during March and in a very brief time complete a valuable catch of hair seals. These animals migrate southward on the ice fields, whelping their young, only to head northward again as soon as the new born family is able to swim. Considerable sea ice emerges through Cabot Strait from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, March to May, and these floes attract attention due to the large number of steamers that are attempting to force passage into the gulf and river ports. The first part of May usually reports the first ship’s arrival at Montreal.
It is extremely interesting to note the marked contrast which exists between coastal and oceanic waters during the colder months of the year, and to note how favorable are the shelf waters south of Newfoundland to the survival of pack ice. Winter chilling of the banks north of the parallel of Halifax lowers the temperature close to the freezing point and thus floes of Arctic ice, as well as smaller quantities of local production, remain to characterize these regions. Outside the continental edge chilling cannot possibly extend to any appreciable degree because the greater depths furnish a supply to the surface as fast as those layers cool and sink. During the winter, therefore, one may trace along the eastern continental edge of North America the sharp demarkation between coastal and oceanic regions—an oceanographic phenomenon known as the “cold wall.” Nowhere in the world is the “cold wall” better developed than off the Tail of the Grand Bank during the spring of the year, when the Ice Patrol has witnessed 32-degree water with its accompanying frigid climate, abutting 60-degree temperature and tropical surroundings —all in the length of the patrol ship!
The Ice Patrol staff has revealed a new conception and significance inherent to the “cold wall” heretofore seldom realized. Coastal and oceanic water mix along this front producing a zone heavier than that on either side. Naturally this water tends to sink and the lighter masses on either side tend to slide inward towards the “cold wall.” This phenomenon, which lies so extraordinarily well developed along our entire Atlantic seaboard, represents a tremendous production of energy; power enough to run the world is constantly being converted into a movement which we call the Gulf Stream.
Let us return and describe the source of the icebergs. We are led to believe that practically all of the bergs which eventually drift into the North Atlantic come from the Greenland ice cap, and, moreover, from those glaciers which are situated along the west coast of that continent. Greenland, with the exception of a narrow coastal fringe, is covered by an enormous sheet of ice 6,000 to 7,000 feet in thickness. The general form of the land block is that of two stepped gneiss planes, the slopes of which face northward. About midway of its meridional distance a depression traverses Greenland; the remains of a major basalt fissure which ran across the Faroe Islands, the Wyville-Thompson Ridge, Iceland, and Greenland in tertiary times. The backbone of the ice, and in all probability, the land, lies in the eastern highlands of Greenland, and thus the sheet presents a long, wide roof sloping gently towards the west. The main mass of the ice, in consequence, slides towards Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, separating into numerous glacial streams as it meets the rugged topography of the western coastal belt. Innumerable tongues fill as many fjords, as the creeping, plastic streams worm their way downward towards the sea, with maximum drainage taking place in the district of Disko Bay, which lies at the western end of the previously mentioned depression. Several glaciers in this locality attain velocities of sixty to seventy feet per day during the warmer months. Small glaciers are found at fjord heads south of Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland but they do not contribute bergs to the North Atlantic. The Ice Patrol has catalogued twenty glaciers out of a total of seventy along the west coast that are productive of sizeable icebergs. The active discharge into the eastern side of Davis Strait and Baffin Bay stretches from Disko Bay on the sixty-ninth parallel to Cape Alexander in latitude 78, a frontage of approximately 800 miles. Ice Patrol officials estimate that normally four to five thousand bergs drift away from this coast line every year. It is curious to note also that the greatest number of bergs are discharged out of the fjords located near the southern end of the line, and the largest glacier in the Northern Hemisphere (the Humboldt), which lies at the northernmost reaches, figures little in the total output.
The Humboldt glacier is an impressive and majestic sight, so vast that the first discoverers mistook it for the ice cap itself. It presents over sixty miles of front, yet practically all of its movement is restricted to its northern side. The detachment and dispersal of bergs from the Humboldt glacier is greatly retarded by fast ice of considerable thinness. Occasionally, perhaps once in twenty years, a warm summer may witness the uncovering of Humboldt glacier, which releases hundreds of icebergs possibly to join the still greater assemblage in Baffin Bay. Such a phenomenon as this may partly explain the heavy iceberg seasons that the patrol occasionally records off Newfoundland.
The Marion expedition under the direction of the U. S. Coast Guard spent some time along the west coast of Greenland last summer observing, from the viewpoint of the Ice Patrol, a few of the most famous iceberg streams. The Jacobshavn glacier which debouches into Disko Bay produces some of the largest and most picturesque bergs that are known. The front itself lies about fifteen miles inside the mouth of a nearly straight four-mile-wide fjord. One looking down in this trough from a high point in the mountains may see the rare and impressive sight of an iceberg column fifteen miles long, four miles wide, end on end, resembling rows of freight cars in a huge switch yard, ready to move down the tracks toward the sea. At uncertain intervals, especially in spring, and early summer, when the shore ice breaks up, there comes without warning, it is vouched, a movement of the iceberg train. Slowly it starts to move, but gaining momentum rapidly, the pack attains the incredible speed of five to eight miles per hour (“As fast as a fox can run,” the natives say), and to the accompaniment of a deafening, thunderous roar that can be heard for miles and lasts for days. This unique phenomenon, termed an “out-shoot” is attributed to the pent-up melted water and ice, which, breaking its dam, spews hundreds of icebergs far out into the sea. The foregoing is a feature characteristic only of Jacobshavn glacier, although many of the other glaciers exhibit periodic calvings most frequent at the time of spring tides.
The American land bordering on the northwestern North Atlantic discharges relatively a very small quantity of glacier ice into the sea. If we glance at a map it will be observed that the land, due primarily to climatic conditions, is nowhere nearly so extensively glaciated as Greenland in the same latitude. The ice covers only the southeastern part of Ellesmere Land; a central cap on Devon Island, and the mid-land ridge of Baffin Island. Our knowledge regarding the iceberg production of these ice sheets, however, is very meager, but their limited extent leads one to assume the annual discharge is small and of little consequence.
Great Karajak, Umiamko, Torsukatak, and Jacobshavn glaciers, all in west Greenland, produce the largest bergs in the Arctic. The Marion expedition, while cruising near the glacier fronts last summer, measured several bergs, the largest of which towered 250 to 275 feet above the surface of the water. The highest berg of authentic record was sighted in 1891 in this same locality, measuring 425 feet in height. The bergs when they have arrived near the steamship tracks are, naturally, not so large as in the Arctic; the average runs about 60 to 100 feet with the tallest one officially recorded as 250 feet. The Ice Patrol occasionally receives reports of bergs three to five miles in length but no such dimensions have ever been verified. The largest berg sighted by the patrol was nearly 1,700 feet in length but only 65 feet high. This huge block weighed roughly 36,000,000 tons but even it is dwarfed when compared with some of the products of the Antarctic. Enormous tabular masses of ice are formed as the ice sheet projects seaward over the Antarctic peneplain, forming ice islands thirty miles or so in length!
The movement of the Greenland bergs, once they leave the fjords, conforms in general to the direction and rate of flow of the ocean currents. Our knowledge of the circulation prevailing between Greenland and North America, due to the inaccessibility of these icy waters, is very scant. A northerly set probably exists along the Greenland coast and a current flows toward the south along the American shore. Some of the best information is contained in the drifts of wreckage and wood, and even survivors living on large drifting ice floes. The British exploring ship Resolute was caught and abandoned in the ice at the western end of Barrow Strait, north and west of Baffin Island, in 1853. The following year the Resolute was picked up in good seaworthy condition off Cape Dier, Baffin Island, having drifted several hundred miles in the southbound current. The most unique journey contained in Arctic annals befell a party from the American explorer Polaris, separated from their ship when she was nipped in the ice at the head of Smith Sound, October, 1872. They sought refuge on an ice floe and, called upon many times to battle for their lives, drifted nearly 1,800 miles southward through Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, when in the spring of 1873 they were rescued by a Newfoundland sealer off the Strait of Belle Isle. The drift was about ten miles per day.
The newly calved icebergs discharged from the west coast of Greenland, apparently, are first carried northward and thence westward around and across Baffin Bay, where they come under the control of a south-flowing current running under the American shore. The journey is uncertain and indirect, and one in which many of the bergs strand, never to drift so far south as Newfoundland. Great fields of sea ice also hamper southward progress, and many more of the bergs are beset by the “west ice,” a vast field which in severe years lays its eastern edge within sight of Greenland’s mountains. Probably not one berg in twenty succeeds in completing the entire 1,800 mile pathway from Greenland to Newfoundland. Current and ice streams are, however, more or less well preserved through the distance by the trend of the North American continental edge, from the northern reaches of Baffin Bay to the extreme tip of the Grand Bank, the so-called Gateway to the Atlantic. This promontory features the Atlantic; before finally merging into the ocean floor southeast of Newfoundland, it juts out into the ocean to a point half way between the pole and the equator. The contour of the Atlantic basin, and especially that of the eastern slope of the Grand Bank, exerts a vital influence on climate and ice conditions.
The Coast Guard cutters on ice patrol have compiled some interesting figures on the southern distribution of the ice. About fifty bergs, one-eighth the number that pass Cape Race, may be expected to drift south of the Tail of the Grand Bank, yet only three of these, on the average, will be transported across the steamship tracks. There are records of phenomenally far southern drifts in which Arctic ice has been sighted near the Azores and Bermuda, but such cases are exceedingly rare. The iceberg season in the North Atlantic may be said to cover a period of about four months, March 15 to July 15. The bergs decrease markedly in numbers after the middle of June, and from the middle of July until the following March the area around the Grand Bank is practically free. An isolated berg may drift southward to the Tail of the Grand Bank but seldom south of it as late as October. After that month it is unusual to sight bergs in these latitudes until the following January or February. The bulky white visitors from the Arctic suffer more rapid wastage the farther south they penetrate, and much of the disintegration in early season is due to lashing waves and ocean swells, which, breaking against the precipitous sides, often throw spray and geysers hundreds of feet aloft. As the season advances this highly erosive feature of disintegration is succeeded by a melting one, and bergs south of Newfoundland during the warm, calm days of late June often glisten in the sun as hundreds of rivulets run from every side. The ice melts fastest just at the surface of the sea, and the patrol often examines bergs that are crisscrossed with marks of several former water lines. The water-line belt is the vulnerable part of the monsters. Where such furrows or other depressions become tilted, they afford the sea an opportunity to surge through back and forth, eventually forming deep-valleyed bergs, a mere shell of their former selves. The last stages are when the sidewalls become so thin that they fall, and the ice more rapidly approaches its inevitable end. A berg in the mixed waters south of the Grand Bank, the Coast Guard has found, will survive as a menace to navigation for a period of ten days to two weeks, but an iceberg farther south within the confines of the Gulf Stream will last only about seven days. The Ice Patrol, one June, in this region, witnessed the complete melting of a huge berg 380 feet in length within a brief period of thirty-six hours! It gave off frequent sounds like the reports of a rifle shot, and rolled about in equilibrium as it rended and detached thousands of tons of ice in roaring avalanches.
The Coast Guard scientists have carried out observations on the visibility of icebergs under various atmospheric conditions. Tall bergs have been sighted eighteen to twenty miles away by a masthead lookout but as a rule it is the bridge which first sights the ice. In a light fog or drizzly rain bergs have been seen one to three miles and moreover there is a tendency to overestimate the distance, believing that one can see farther than is actually the case. In a dense fog a berg cannot be seen more than one hundred yards ahead of the ship, where it takes form as a luminous white mass if the sun is shining on it; otherwise it first appears close aboard as a dark sombre shape. On a clear, dark, starlight night a lookout will not pick up a berg at a greater distance than one- fourth of a mile, and then the first thing that catches the eye is the swell breaking against its base. A vessel in the ice regions during darkness, fog, or snow should slow down so as to be able to maneuver within the range of visibility.
The Ice Patrol receives numerous inquiries whether or not the dangerous proximity of a berg can be determined when invisible because of fog or darkness. The answer is, “No.” The temperature or the salinity of the sea differs so slightly, if at all, near a berg that this state constitutes no warning whatsoever. Experiments to locate bergs by means of reflected submarine sounds have been partially successful but no practical alarm has been developed.
We have previously mentioned some of the scientific investigations that the Coast Guard has been carrying out in order to provide the most efficient service possible to North Atlantic shipping. The cutters have many difficulties to combat, in the form of gales, fog, and the great area in which the ice may sometimes be distributed. The entire ice regions are the province of the Ice Patrol but attention usually becomes focused on an area of about 40,000 square miles (equal in size to the State of Pennsylvania) immediately south of the Tail of the Grand Bank. The currents over this area also are subjected to devious paths, and a berg may be carried slowly to the westward in one part of the current, while other ice farther offshore is perhaps swept across the bows of approaching passenger ships.
In order to follow intelligently the movements of the icebergs in the critical area, when they cannot actually be seen due to the protracted periods of fog, or to inability to cover the. entire area, the Ice Patrol has developed a mathematical method in physical oceanography to learn the particular prevailing picture of circulation. A witness to the Coast Guard cutters making one of its routine current surveys sees the businesslike side of oceanography. The ship is cruised at ten to fifteen knots speed over the critical area it is desired to map, stopping at designated positions only long enough to secure a record of the temperature and the salinity at several levels down to a depth of 1,000 meters. The specialized field of physical oceanography, for which the Coast Guard has found a practical use, has its genesis in dynamics and geophysics contributed by Bjerknes, a Norwegian physicist. The final result, after calculations have been applied to the data, is a topographical map of the sea surface looking for all the world like the everyday isobaric map issued by our Weather Bureau. It has been the policy of the patrol for the past three years to keep on board at all times an up-to-date current map of the area immediately north of the steamship lanes, for reference and consultation in carrying out an effective iceberg protection. A detailed description of the foregoing methods is contained in Ice Patrol Bulletin No. 14.
The Coast Guard is continually endeavoring to add more to its knowledge regarding icebergs and thereby provide greater safety to life and property on the North Atlantic. Last summer the service fitted out one of its 125-foot patrol boats, the Marion, and organized and carried out a detailed hydrographical survey of the sea between Greenland and North America from St. John’s, Newfoundland, northward to Disko Bay, Greenland. The area covered is equal in size to the one embraced from Cape Cod to Key West, and extending offshore a distance of 500 miles. The main object of the expedition was to learn the whole story regarding the wanderings of the icebergs from the Greenland glaciers to their final disintegration in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The Ice Patrol during its seventeen years of service had carried out extensive surveys of the waters between the Gulf Stream and the latitude of Cape Race, Newfoundland, but the Marion, oceanographically speaking, explored the practically unknown seas of Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. The final reports which are now being prepared for publication by the Coast Guard are bound to contain both practical and scientific results of great general interest.
In conclusion we wish to give our readers a glimpse of the service through the eyes of those for whom it is mainly intended. How many of the passengers enjoying the comforts of a well-lighted saloon or music room on one of our modern transatlantic liners are aware of the forces which are out there in the disagreeable weather maintaining a keen lookout for ice? Let us put ourselves in the captain’s shoes. We have just finished supper and, stepping out on the deck, the quartermaster brings a memorandum from the officer of the deck. The seawater temperature the last hour has dropped from sixty to thirty-five degrees. There is a chill around decks. Yes, there is no doubt the ship has entered the cold Arctic current. Night is approaching and ahead we espy a low, dark bank of fog on the horizon. Dangerous ice may be encountered now at any time. At a speed of twenty-five knots, with darkness and fog approaching, there would be only a few seconds between the lookout’s hail and the collision. Fifteen hundred on the passenger list is not a very pleasant prospect for the master’s peace of mind that night. The little Ice Patrol ship is not very far away, perhaps over the horizon to the northward and in half an hour she sends out her regular 8:00 p.m. broadcast ice warning. The captain reads it over his chart table. “Ice Patrol ship 42-30N. 50- 17W. Bergs in the following positions, 42- 10N., 51-30W., 42-15N., 50-45W. One large berg 42-30N., 49-40W. This is southernmost ice.” Our course is in 41-30N. All is clear along our track!
During the past seventeen years, since the terrible Titanic disaster, and the establishment of an Ice Patrol, not a single life has been lost through collision with ice along the United States-Europe steamship routes. Such a record is a fine tribute to the management by the United States government, and in particular, it is a great source of pride to the Coast Guard.