JAN. 1769 A NIGHT IN THE SNOW 53 



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 shout- 

 ing, 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. Eich- 

 mond 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 im- 

 possible 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 com- 

 panions upon a bed of boughs and covering them over with 

 boughs as thickly as possible, and thus we left them, hope- 

 less 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 



