from Narrative of an Expedition to The Polar Sea, 1820-1823

(page 102)

In this day's journey we saw an unusual phenomenon: in the N.E. horizon there appeared an insulated dark-grey cloud, from which white beams streamed to the zenith and across it to the opposite horizon, resembling the beams of the Aurora, but whether luminous or not we could not tell, on account of the daylight. The phenomenon lasted about half an hour. One of our Cossacks, who had been before on the Polar Sea, maintained that the cloud was occasioned by vapour rising from a sudden crack in the ice. On the same evening there was an Aurora extending from N.E. to N.W.