examined many deposits on shore that came from beached icebergs. He deduced that these alluvia corresponded to the rocky conditions of the continents. His opinion was that part of the Earth, including the North American plate, had not been covered by ice but, rather, submerged. Then as the water had receded, the continents reappeared and the icebergs had carried boulders from the land. The ‘floating mountains’ solved the riddle of rocks scattered far from any ice mass.
Lyell’s hypotheses influenced many explorers. They looked for evidence that icebergs carried pieces of rock. By the 1860s, however, empirical evidence confirmed Agassiz’s arguments. His rival eventually abandoned his theories of iceberg ‘rafts’.5
Church’s painting has gone through several versions and many variations. Long forgotten, it is now a much prized work. It is not only a tribute to Franklin and the strange beauty of ice, it is a nod to a geological argument about the Ice Age. Off the coast of the island of Newfoundland in the summer of 1859, Noble saw icebergs as the monuments representing the whole world. The artist painted his canvases imagining that these sublime masses carried the debris of a once sunken planet.
The reign of the sublime
Church went north with a mind full of books. Like most of his contemporaries, he was aware of travelogues and scientific writings. But at the forefront of his thinking were the now popular reflections of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant on the sublime. In these theories of the previous century, the canonical examples are those of a mountain whose snowy peak pierces the clouds, of a storm breaking, or of a storm seen from the shore. The fictional viewer experiences a paradoxical feeling of a fear of dying while remaining in safety. All five senses warn one of the risks. At the same time, one feels infinitely free. One’s reason finds strength in confronting an idea of the absolutely immense, even of the unlimited. At a safe distance, one might assume that one’s life is not really in danger.
These ideas were widely disseminated among the international community of polar explorers. Confronted with icebergs, everyone feels the same contradictory emotions as those described by philosophers when faced with raging waves, lightning in the sky or alpine snow. Adventurers are both terrified and amazed, overwhelmed and exhilarated. They rediscover their dual nature as sentient and spiritual beings. They feel both fragile and powerful, both mere mortals and true demiurges. In Church and Noble’s time, the spectacle of the iceberg was already over-coded by theories of the sublime.
Another argument recurs in this interpretive framework: titanic forms bear the imprint of a higher principle. Kane described the Arctic as ‘a landscape such as Milton or Dante might imagine – inorganic, desolate, mysterious’. He was careful to add: ‘I have come down from deck with the feelings of a man who has looked upon a world unfinished by the hand of its Creator.’ The spectacular appearance of the icebergs is a reminder of the humble condition of humans. The drifting boulder is ‘one of God’s own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man.’6 The theme is an old one. Long before the beginnings of polar exploration, the iceberg was seen as a work of providence.
We are in Ireland, in the sixth century.
A monk tells another monk about his voyage in a stone trough, as in the legends of the Breton saints. He evokes a remote, isolated and magical island. All shrouded in fog, it is hidden from inquisitive eyes and unvisited by storms. On this land, nothing happens as elsewhere: nature is luxuriant, time slows down, no one feels any material need. Faced with so many marvels recounted by his own godson, Mernoc the monk, Brendan de Clonfert decides to make the same journey. After months of meticulous preparations, he and his fourteen companions embark on a small boat made of wood and leather. They set off towards the Northwest in search of paradise.
In their frail curach, the pilgrims huddle around the single mast. The voyage is full of hazards and miracles. They come across birds singing divine hymns and drink sleeping potions. They inadvertently cook meat on the backs of gigantic dormant fish and are attacked by sea monsters.
One day, a crystal pillar appears. It seems very close, yet it takes them three days to reach it. When Brendan looks up, he cannot see the top of the transparent pillar, which is lost in the sky. Gradually, other pillars appear. At the very top, a huge platter sits on four square legs. A sheet with thick, undulating mesh as far as the eye can see envelops it. The monks think they are looking at an altar and a tapestry. They tell themselves that this is the Lord’s work.
Brendan notices a gap where their boat could slip through. He orders his companions to lower the sail and mast. They gently row into the crevice and find themselves inside a huge reticular mass. Corridors stretch out endlessly. The colours in the walls are shimmering, changing from green to blue. Shades of silver sparkle. Their fingertips graze a material that feels like marble. At the bottom of the water, they see the ground on which the diaphanous block rests. The sun is reflected in it. There is bright light, inside and out. Brendan takes measurements. For four days they calculate the dimensions of the sides. The whole thing is several kilometres and as long as it is wide. The pilgrims can’t believe it.
The next day, they discover a flared bowl and a golden plate adorning the edge of one of the pillars. Brendan is not surprised. He places the chalice and paten before him and begins to celebrate the Eucharist. When the ceremony is over, he and his companions hoist the mast and sail. They take hold of the oars and set off. On their return journey, they are carried by favourable winds that bring them home without incident.7
Brendan’s epic was copied hundreds of times between the ninth and the thirteenth century, a real bestseller. Today’s commentators believe that the travelling monks saw an iceberg floating off the coast of Iceland. They would have entered the straits where icebergs calve off the coastal glaciers of Greenland.
At the time Church and Noble were travelling, icebergs were, in the European imagination, sometimes the ancestors of a geological age, sometimes creatures in the service of a sacred history. In both cases, they are icons of the sublime. Our narrator and the painter are not the only ones to see ‘floating mountains’ in the ocean, or cathedrals, ruins of lost cities, winding avenues, and sometimes even the face of the Creator. When ships are icebound, there is plenty of time to observe the landscape, and at such moments the romantic mind opens its toolbox and chooses the most expressive aides.
Thomas M’Keevor served in 1812 as the physician for the Selkirk settlers in the Red River Colony in Canada. In a short travelogue, he expresses his fascination for the icebergs adorning Hudson Bay. Some of them, he wrote,
bear a very close resemblance to an ancient abbey with arched doors and windows, and all the rich embroidery of the Gothic style of architecture; while others assume the appearance of a Grecian temple supported by round massive columns of an azure hue, which at a distance looked like the purest mountain granite . . . The spray of the ocean, which dashes against these mountains, freezes into an infinite variety of forms and gives to the spectator ideal towers, streets, churches, steeples, and in fact every shape which the most romantic imagination could picture to itself.8
This description is already in the style of Louis Legrand Noble! It shows that icebergs have been perceived, in the Western world, as a real production in the amphitheatre of the most unbridled reveries. We all have the faculty of imagination in common. The five Labrador Inuit shown around London by Captain George Cartwright in 1772 thought St Paul’s Cathedral was a mountain. They mistook the bridge over the Thames for some kind of stone structure. Those from Avannaa who landed with the explorer Robert Peary in New York in 1887 were struck by the resemblance of the first skyscrapers in Manhattan to icebergs. Each, in its own way, mixes ‘the natural and the architectural’.9 The metaphorical gaze, transposing one environment into another, is no less a characteristic of the Romantic spirit. Western travellers are wordsmiths. They make sentences. They chase the wildest of associations and spend their time
