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. Rich- 
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 
