of dread. The northern cold was soon upon them in all
its rigour. The ships were frozen in at their moorings
from the middle of November till April 15. The ice lay
two fathoms thick in the river, and the driving snows
and great drifts blotted out under the frozen mantle of
winter all sight of land and water. The French could
scarcely stir from their quarters. Their fear of Indian
treachery and their ignorance of the trackless country
about them held them imprisoned in their ships. A worse
peril was soon added. The scourge of scurvy was laid upon
them--an awful disease, hideous in its form and deadly
in its effect. Originating in the Indian camp, it spread
to the ships. In December fifty of the Stadacona Indians
died, and by the middle of February, of the hundred and
ten men that made up Cartier's expedition, only three or
four remained in health. Eight were already dead, and
their bodies, for want of burial, lay frozen stark beneath
the snowdrifts of the river, hidden from the prying eyes
of the savages. Fifty more lay at the point of death,
and the others, crippled and staggering with the onslaught
of disease, moved to and fro at their tasks, their fingers
numbed with cold, their hearts frozen with despair.

The plague that had fallen upon them was such as none of
them had ever before seen. The legs of the sufferers
swelled to huge, unsightly, and livid masses of flesh.
Their sinews shrivelled to blackened strings, pimpled
with purple clots of blood. The awful disease worked its
way upwards. The arms hung hideous and useless at the
side, the mouth rotted till the teeth fell from the putrid