 Experts at the prestigious London auction house Bonhams credited the watercolour to Back, claiming it had been presented by Back to his sister Katherine Pares, and thence descended through her family.The auction house opined that the scene surrounding the towering iceberg appears to match a description in Back's "Narrative of an Expedition in H.M.S.Terror" (1838) when the "Terror" was in the Davis Strait (between Canada and Greenland) that reads "in the evening (of 29 July 1836) when the weather cleared ... we observed an enormous berg, the perpendicular face of which was not less than 300 feet high..."

Back drew "HMS Terror Thrown Up By Ice" (1836) and the portrait "A Buffalo Pound" (1823), which was later reworked into an engraving.