244 UESCRIPTIOX OF GREENLAND. 



SOth. according to our manner of reckoning ; at eight o'clock 

 in the evening, there was an eclipse of the moon. The same 

 night the moon for two hours was surrounded by a very 

 bright circle, in which appeared a cross which cut the moon 

 in four. This meteor appears to have been the foreteller of 

 all the evils that these Danes would have to suffer, and of 

 their almost utter ruin, as you will hear. 



The winter became so severe and sharp that they found 

 ice of three hundred and of three hundred and sixty feet 

 thick. The beer and wine, even the purest Spanish, and the 

 strongest brandy, were frozen from the top to the bottom of 

 their vessels. The cold, which broke the hoops and burst 

 the tuns, left the beer and wine in the consistency of ice, so 

 hard that they were obliged to cut it with hatchets in order 

 to melt and drink it. The vessels of pewter and copper, 

 when, by neglect, they had overnight forgotten the water, were 

 the next morning cracked and broken at the place where the 

 water was frozen. This severe season, which did not spare 

 metals, did not spare men either. The poor Danes fell ill, 

 and the sickness increased among them with the cold. They 

 suffered from looseness, which did not leave them until they 

 were carried off. They died one after the other and so 

 many, that at the commencement of May their captain was 

 obliged to guard his tent himself. This ilhiess increased in- 

 stead of diminishing at the beginning of spring. It loosened 

 the teeth of the sufferers, and ulcerated the inside of their 

 mouths so much, that they could only eat bread steeped in 

 melted water. It attacked the last dying men towards the 

 month of May with so much malignity, that to all these evils 

 was added dysentery, and so sensitive were the nervous 

 parts, that it seemed as if some one was pricking them all 

 over with the point of a knife. They visibly shrunk, their 

 arms and legs became numbed, and their bodies livid and 

 black, as if they had been beaten. The description of this 

 sickness is really what is called scorbutic, well known and 



