For two hours now it had snowed almost incessantly, so that we had little hopes of seeing any of the three alive; about midnight, however, to our great joy, we heard a shouting, on which I and four more went out immediately, and found it to be the seaman, who had walked, almost starved to death, from where he lay. I sent him back to the fire and proceeded by his direction to find the other two. Richmond was upon his legs, but not able to walk; the other lay on the ground as insensible as a stone. We immediately called all hands from the fire, and attempted, by all the means we could contrive, to bring them down, but found it absolutely impossible. The road was so bad, and the night so dark, that we could scarcely ourselves get on, nor did we without many falls. We would then have lit a fire upon the spot, but the snow on the ground, as well as that which continually fell, rendered this plan as impracticable as the other, and to bring fire from the other place was also impossible from the quantity of snow which fell every moment from the branches of the trees. We were thus obliged to content ourselves with laying out our unfortunate companions upon a bed of boughs and covering them over with boughs as thickly as possible, and thus we left them, hopeless of ever seeing them again alive, which, indeed, we never did.
In this employment we had spent an hour and a half, exposed to the most penetrating cold I ever felt, as well as to continual snow. Peter Brisco, another servant of mine, began now to complain, and before we came to the fire became very ill, but got there at last almost dead with cold.
Now might our situation be called terrible: of twelve, our original number, two were already past all hopes, one more was so ill that, though he was with us, I had little hopes of his being able to walk in the morning, and another seemed very likely to relapse into his fits, either before we set out or in the course of our journey. We were distant from the ship, we did not know how far; we knew only that we had spent the greater part of a day in walking through pathless woods: provision we had none but one
