in 1631, wintered poor Captain James with his wrecked crew. This is
a point outside the Arctic circle, but quite cold enough. Of
nights, with a good fire in the house they built, hoar frost covered
their beds, and the cook's water in a metal pan before the fire was
warm on one side and froze on the other. Here "it snowed and froze
extremely, at which time we, looking from the shore towards the
ship, she appeared a piece of ice in the fashion of a ship, or a
ship resembling a piece of ice." Here the gunner, who hand lost his
leg, besought that, "for the little the he had to live, he might
drink sack altogether." He died and was buried in the ice far from
the vessel, but when afterwards two more were dead of scurvy, and
the others, in a miserable state, were working with faint hope about
their shattered vessel, the gunner was found to have returned home
to the old vessel; his leg had penetrated through a port-hole. They
"digged him clear out, and he was as free from noisomeness," the
record says, "as when we first committed him to the sea. This
alteration had the ice, and water, and time, only wrought on him,
that his flesh would slip up and down upon his bones, like a glove
on a man's hand. In the evening we buried him by the others."
These worthy souls, laid up with the agonies of scurvy, knew that in
action was their only hope; they forced their limbs to labour, among
ice and water, every day. They set about the building of a boat,
but the hard frozen wood had broken their axes, so they made shift
with the pieces. To fell a tree, it was first requisite to light in
fire around it, and the carpenter could only labour with his wood
over a fire, or else it was like stone under his tools. Before the
boat was made they buried the carpenter. The captain exhorted them
to put their trust in God; "His will be done. If it be our fortune
to end our days here, we are as near Heaven as in England. They all
protested to work to the utmost of their strength, and that they