ICE-Island, a name given by sailors to a great quantity of ice collected into one huge solid mass, and floating about upon the seas near or within the Polar circles. — Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coasts of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the shipping employed in the Greenland fishery. In the midst of these tremendous masses navigators have been arrested and frozen to death. In this manner the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished with all his crew in 1553; and in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most finished seaman could make to accomplish the end of his voyage, was caught in the ice, and was near experiencing the same unhappy fate. See the account at large in Phipps's Voyage to the North Pole. As there described, the scene, divested of the horror from the eventful expectation of change, was the most beautiful and picturesque:—Two large ships becalmed in a vast basin, surrounded on all sides by islands of various forms: the weather clear: the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was low, smooth, and even; covered with snow, excepting where the pools of water on part of the surface appeared crystalline with the young ice: the small space of sea they were confined in perfectly smooth. After fruitless attempts to force a way through the fields of ice, their limits were perpetually contracted by its closing; till at length it befell each vessel till they became immovably fixed. The smooth extent of surface was soon lost; the pressure of the pieces of ice, by the violence of the swell, caused them to pack: fragment rose upon fragment till they were in many places higher than the main-yard. The movements of the ships were tremendous and involuntary, in conjunction with the surrounding ice, actuated by the currents. The water shoaled to 14 fathoms. The grounding of the ice or of the ships would have been equally fatal: The force of the ice might have crushed them to atoms, or have lifted them out of the water and overflown them, or have left them suspended on the summits of the pieces of ice at a tremendous height, exposed to the fury of the winds, or to the risk of being dashed to pieces by the failure of their frozen deck. An attempt was made to cut a passage through the ice; after a perseverance worthy of Britons, it proved fruitless. The commander, at all times matter of himself, directed the boats to be made ready to be hauled over the ice, till they arrived at navigable water (a task alone of seven days), and in them to make their voyage to England. The boats were drawn progressively three whole days. At length a wind sprung up, the ice separated sufficiently to yield to the pressure of the full-sailed ships, which, after labouring against the resisting fields of ice, arrived on the 10th of August in the harbour of Smeerenburg, at the west end of Spitzbergen, between it and Hackluyt's Headland.

The forms assumed by the ice in this chilling climate are extremely pleasing to even the most incurious eye. The surface of that which is congealed from the sea water (for we must allow it two origins) is flat and even, hard, opaque, resembling white sugar, and incapable of being trodden on, like the British ice. The greater pieces, or fields, are many leagues in length: the lesser are the meadows of the seas, on which these animals at times frolic by hundreds. The motion of the lesser pieces is as rapid as the currents: the greater, which are sometimes 200 leagues long, and 60 or 80 broad, move slow and majestically; often fix for a time, immoveable by the power of the ocean, and then produce near the horizon that bright white appearance called the blink. The approximation of two great fields produces a most singular phenomenon: it forces the lesser (if the term can be applied to pieces of several acres square) out of the water, and adds them to their surface; a second and often a third succeeds; so that the whole forms an aggregate of a tremendous height. These float in the sea like so many rugged mountains, and are sometimes 500 or 600 yards thick; but the far greater part is concealed beneath the water. There are continually increased in height by the freezing of the spray of the sea, or of the melting of the snow, which falls on them. Those which remain in this frozen climate receive continual growth; others are gradually wafted by the northern winds into southern latitudes, and melt by degrees, by the heat of the sun, till they waste away, or disappear in the boundless element.

The collision of the great fields of ice, in high latitudes, is often attended with a noise that for a time takes away the sense of hearing any thing else; and the lesser with a grinding of unspeakable horror. The water which dashes against the mountainous ice freezes into an infinite variety of forms; and gives the voyager ideal towns, streets, churches, steeples, and every shape which imagination can frame.

ICE-Plant. See MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, BOTANY Index.