With one portion of the phenomena of the North Sea, we were particularly disappointed--and this was the aurora. The colours, in all cases, were vastly inferior to those seen by us in far southern latitudes, a pale golden or straw colour being the prevailing hue; the most striking part of it was its apparent proximity to the earth. Once or twice the auroral coruscations accompanied a moon in its last quarter, and generally previous to bad weather. On one occasion, in Christmas-week, the light played about the edge of a low vapour which hung at a very small altitude over us; it never, on this occasion, lit up the whole under-surface of the said clouds, but formed a series of concentric semicircles of light, with dark spaces between, which waved, glistened, and vanished, like moonlight upon a heaving, but unbroken sea.
At other times, a stream of the same coloured vapour would span the heavens through the zenith, and from it would shoot sprays of pale orange colour for many hours; and then the mysterious light would again as suddenly vanish.
Clouds may have been said to have absented themselves from our sky for at least two months of the winter; the heavens, the stars, and moon, were often obscured, but it invariably appeared to be from snow-drift rather than from a cloudy sky. Snow fell incessantly, even on the clearest day, consisting of minute spiculæ, hardly perceptible to the eye, but which accumulated rapidly, and soon covered any thing left in the open air for a few minutes. With returning daylight, and the promise of the sun, clouds again dotted the southern heavens, and mottled with beautiful mackerel skies the dome above us.
The immense quantity of snow which in a gale is kept suspended in the air by the action of the wind, and is termed drift, quite astounded us; and on two occasions, with north-westerly gales, we had a good opportunity of noting its accumulation. The "Pioneer" and "Intrepid" laying across the wind, the counter-current caused a larger deposition around us than elsewhere. On the first occasion, after the wind subsided, we found a snow-wreath along the weather-side of the vessel for a length of one hundred and eighty feet, about eleven feet deep in the deepest part, and sloping gradually away for one hundred yards. After weighing a cubic foot of the snow, I calculated that, at the lowest computation, the mass thus deposited in twenty-four hours was not less than four hundred tons in weight! How the floe bore the pressure seemed unaccountable to me; but it did around the "Pioneer," although that near the "Intrepid" broke down, and the water flowed up above the snow, forming it rapidly into ice.