Notwithstanding the dangers that surrounded our adventurers, they were none of them so insensible to the sublime powers of nature as to withhold their admiration from the many glorious objects which that lone and wild scene presented.  The ice-bergs were of all the hues of the rainbow, as the sunlight gilded their summits or sides, or they were left shaded by the interposition of dark and murky clouds.  There were instances when certain of the huge frozen masses even appeared to be quite black, in particular positions and under peculiar lights; while others, at the same instant, were gorgeous in their gleams of emerald and gold!

The aquatic birds, also, had now become numerous again.  Penguins were swimming about, filling the air with their discordant cries, while there was literally no end of the cape-pigeons and petrels.  Albatrosses, too, helped to make up the picture of animated nature, while whales were often heard blowing in the adjacent waters.  Gardiner saw many signs of the proximity of land, and began to hope he should yet actually discover the islands laid down on his chart, as their position had been given by Daggett.

In that high latitude a degree of longitude is necessarily much shorter than when nearer to the middle of our orb.  On the equator, a degree of longitude measures, as is known to most boarding-school young ladies, just sixty geographical, or sixty-nine and a half English statute miles.  But, as is not known to most boarding-school young ladies, or is understood by very few of them indeed, even when known, in the sixty-second degree of latitude, a degree of longitude measures but little more than thirty-two of those very miles.  The solution of this seeming contradiction is so very simple that it may assist a certain class of our readers if we explain it, by telling them that it arises solely from the fact that these degrees of longitude, which are placed sixty geographical miles asunder at the centre or middle of the earth, converge towards the poles, where they all meet in a point.  According to the best observations Roswell Gardiner could obtain, he was just one of these short degrees of longitude, or two-and-thirty miles, to the westward of the parallel where he wished to be, when the wind came from the southward.  The change was favourable, as it emboldened him to run nearer than he otherwise might have felt disposed to do, to the great barrier of ice which now formed a sort of weather-shore.  Fortunately, the loose bergs and sunken masses had drifted off so far to the northward, that once within them the schooner had pretty plain sailing; and Roswell, to lose none of the precious time of the season, ventured to run, though under very short canvass, the whole of the short night that succeeded.  It is a great assistance to the navigation of those seas that, during the summer months, there is scarcely any night at all, giving the adventurer sufficient light by which to thread his way among the difficulties of his pathless journey.