48 THE NORTH ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH: Greenland and Iceland; but I do not see in what way that will affect a small cable lying upon the bottom of the sea. Icefields do not prevent the Baltic being crossed with electric cables. Ice does not cut off communication across American lakes, or Eussian rivers; nor did it prevent a cable being carried round the head of the Black Sea, where in the winter there is no lack of ice. Indeed, why should it ? Hoe, or field ice, is the frozen surface of the sea; so long as it is attached to the shore, it is far less dangerous than surf or breakers would be. When it moves about it is afloat, and when afloat there is always water enough beneath it to allow a cable of half-an-inch or more diameter, to lie undisturbed on the bottom of the sea. The delicate shells, weeds, Crustacea, and other animate and inanimate productions which cover the bottom of the Arctic sea in latitudes far north of where it is proposed this cable shall be placed, afford the best proof that the bottom of the Northern sea is a far safer and pleasanter place of sojourn than that surface over which we Arctic seamen have lately so often sailed and laboured. People, therefore, when reading of our adventures and hair-breadth escapes in wooden vessels, within that Arctic zone, should take care not to confound the top with the bottom of the sea in those ice-incumbered regions. That there may be some difficulties in the route I do not deny, but I see none that a better knowledge of ocean telegraphy will not every year render more easily surmountable, or none that engineering and nautical skill will not meet and master. The heavy ice-drift along the coast of Labrador indicates, in my opinion, a generally deep-water coast. Icebergs would otherwise ground far out to sea, which is not the case; but beyond that fact we know nothing of the soundings, or of that sea-coast of the Canadas, I consider the main difficulty of the North-about route to lie between the point at which about 150 fathoms water will be found on that Labrador shore, and so in to the coast. But if anywhere upon the bottom of that submerged shore of Labrabor a line of deep-sea soundings can be found, with a shallower bank to the north of it, so as to form a sort of trough, running in an east and west direction, there can be little doubt, as Colonel Shaffner says, that the cable will lie there as safe as it would do across the Strait of Dover. North or south of such a trench the icebergs would naturally ground, and form what Arctic navigators term “ reefs.’5 Such reefs are common throughout the western coasts of the Davis Strait and Baffin’s Bay; they mark the shoals, and, guided by them, our whaling vessels find generally deeper water free of ice- bergs, these deeper channels usually running into inlets or bays similar to those so common in Labrador.

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