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Ships Seen in the Air
NE of the beautiful, British fleet, consisting of nineteen sail. deceptive phenom- Here, again, the distance between the ena known as the vessels was found to be full thirty miles. mirage is that form In both these instances the objects seen of it where some were inverted. At Hastings, on the south distant object, below coast of England, a more striking examthe line of the hori- ple of mirage was witnessed. The whole zon, and consequent- of the coast of France, from Calais to ly out of the range of vision, Dieppe, though more than fifty miles seems to be lifted into mid-air distant, and quite out of the range of and to hang suspended there- ordinary vision, seemed to be lifted up sometimes in its natural posi- into mid-air, and was seen there, not tion, sometimes upside down, inverted but in its natural position, durand sometimes both ways at ing the space of three hours, by hundreds once; the image in this latter of persons assembled upon the beach. case being doubled, like a The most remarkable instance of all, however, is that from Ramsgate, the four ship and its reflection in the water.
Of this kind of mirage there are turrets of Dover Castle may be seen on a some very striking instances on record. fine day over the top of an intervening While sailing in the Polar seas, Captain hill. While looking in this direction one Scoresby saw the inverted image of a evening, the whole castle was seen, not ship, apparently suspended in the air, lifted up in the air above the hill on the some miles distant. It was, he writes, so other side, but to all appearances brought well defined that I could distinguish by a over bodily on this side of it. So strong telescope every sail, the general rig of was the image, that the hill could not be the ship, and its particular character, in- seen through it. The double mirage is somuch that I pronounced it to be my seen oftenest on the shore of the Straits father's ship, which it afterwards proved of Messina, where the phenomenon is to be; though on comparing notes with known as the Fata Morgana. The images my father when we met, I found that our of men, horses, houses and ships are prorelative position at the time gave our jected into the air, feet to feet, or keel to distance from one another very nearly keel, as the case may be, until the atmosthirty miles, being about seventeen miles beyond the horizon, and some leagues beyond the limit of direct vision. phere looks like one huge lake, in which all these miscellaneous objects are seen floating about together.
An English ship, while cruising in the The editor of this work was once out Baltic, saw a similar mirage of the whole on the Niagara River, near its mouth, and looking out towards Lake Ontario, Suddenly in the distance, where all is into which the Niagara empties, he known to be arid sand, appears a sheet observed an instance of the beautiful of water. Here and there upon its bosom mirage. Apparently in the air, upside lie enchanted islands, above the top of down, was a figure of a steamboat. This whose woody grove rise the turrets of was so distinct that the smoke-stacks were castles, or minarets of mosques. So real plainly to be seen, as well as the entire is the sight that men and camels push forform and shape of the vessel. The image ward, longing to bathe in the refreshing SHIPS SEEN IN THE AIR IN THE ARCTIC REGIONS. was observed for several minutes, and waters of this fairy lake; but as they adthen it became indistinct and slowly vance the mirage retreats, and all fades as faded from sight. Science could explain, the sun sinks beneath the lurid horizon. on the principle of the refraction of light, The explanation of the phenomenon is this phenomenon which is one of the this: that the sand, being intensely hot, most singular observed in nature. causes the layer of air which rests upon Eastern travellers often tell scarcely it to become greatly rarefied; and under credible tales of the mirage of the desert. certain circumstances this layer is quite distinct from the denser stratum a few the surface at which the two layers meet inches or feet above it-just as if it were being quite sharply defined. We have here a sheet of water upon which oil rested, one of the marvels of the atmosphere.
