about the stores of ammunition and provisions, and various requisites
which could be conveyed from the ship, to be stored in the hut for
winter use. They pursued their way in the highest spirits, picturing
to themselves the delight which they were about to give to their
companions. When they arrived on the shore, not a vestige of the ship
was to be seen; no track through the waters marked her path; all was
still and silent, desolate and bleak: no familiar face was seen; not
one of their comrades was left to tell the hapless tale! They stood
aghast, looking in mute despair upon the sea. The ice by which the
vessel had been hemmed in had totally disappeared. The violent storm
of the night before, they concluded, might have been the cause of this
fatal disaster; the ice might have been disturbed by the agitation of
the waves, and beaten violently against the ship, till she was
shattered to pieces; or she might, perhaps, have been carried on by
the current into the ocean, and there lost. However it might have
been, they were never to see her again. What a difference a few short
moments had made in their feelings and in their fate! They thought to
have re-entered the hut with glad companions; they returned to it the
sole inhabitants of that desolate region, disconsolate, and utterly
hopeless of ever leaving it. When they could collect their thoughts,
they were anxiously turned to the preservation of their lives, for
which it was necessary to provide some kind of sustenance. The island
abounded with reindeer, and they brought down one with every charge of
their powder. They set about devising means to repair the hut, which,
from the cracks and crevices produced by the weather, let in the
piercingly cold air in various directions. No wood, or even shrub,
grew on that sterile ground. Nothing could be more dreary than the
prospect--a bleak waste without vegetation; the high mountains with
their rock and crags; the everlasting ice and the vast masses of snow.
The very sublimity of the scene was awfully impressed with all the