Berg

The new S. S. Hamburg, steaming toward Manhattan last week, sighted a giant iceberg as she passed below the Newfoundland Banks. It was a day of brilliant sunshine and the 100-foot peak of glistening ice flashed green, white and pale blue against the white-veined cobalt of the deep ocean. Striding his bridge, Commodore Thomas Kier of the Hamburg-American fleet paused to reflect that it was one of the most magnificent marine spectacles that he could remember in his long years at sea.

An agitated woman rushed up on the bridge. "Captain Kier!" she cried. "Aren't you going to take those people off?"

"What people, Madam?" asked the mystified captain.

"Why, the people on the iceberg! They must be Eskimos, you should take them off!"

Not without difficulty was the kind woman persuaded that the marooned people of the forbidding floating island were merely black spots dancing upon the retinas of her own eyes induced by the dazzling light on the berg's ice crystals. Commodore Kier realized that the phenomenon is a common one, though never before had a passenger been moved by it to demand that he stop his ship. . . . What interested him more was the unusual presence of ice in the main Atlantic passenger lanes so late in spring.* He and other well-informed persons wished good luck to the expedition going north this month under Professors Hobbs of Michigan and Barnes of McGill to experiment with the latter's "ice thermit" in destroying bergs at their glacial sources in Greenland (TIME, March 1, April 5).

*Also, during the week, officers of the S. S. Mauretania saw a large iceberg six miles to starboard, and an iceberg observed from the S. S. Arabic was described as "mammoth."