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HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



they had enjoyed for months. They kept up the genial heat 

 until several of the least vigorous of the men were seized with, 

 dizziness and with the peculiar pains known as the hot-ache. 

 Gerard de Veer, the chronicler of the expedition, caught in his 

 arms the first man that fell, and revived him by rubbing his face 

 with vinegar. He adds, " We had now learned that to avoid one 

 evil we should not rush into a worse one." 



They set traps all around their cabin, with which they caught 

 on an average a fox a day. They eat the flesh, and with the 

 skins made caps and mittens. They had the good fortune to 

 kill a bear nine feet long, from which they obtained one hundred 

 pounds of lard. This they found useful, not as pomatum, but 

 as the means of burning their lamp constantly, day and night, 

 as if it were an altar and they the vestal virgins. On the 19th 

 of December, they congratulated themselves that the Arctic 

 night was just one-half expired; "for," says the narrative, "it 

 was a terrible thing to be without the light of the sun, and de- 

 prived of the most excellent creature of God, which enliveneth 

 the entire universe." On Christmas eve it snowed so violently 

 that they could not open the door. The next day there was a 

 white frost in the cabin. While seated at the fire and toasting 

 their legs, their backs were frozen stiff. They did not know by 

 the feeling that they were burning their shoes, and were only 

 warned by the odor of the shrivelling leather. They put a strip 

 of linen into the air, to see which way the wind was : in an in- 

 stant the linen was frozen as hard as a board, and became, of 

 course, perfectly useless as a weathercock. Then the men said 

 to each other, "How excessively cold it must be out of doors !' s 



The 5th of January was Twelfth Night, and the hut was 

 buried under the snow. In the midst of their misery, they 

 asked the captain's leave to celebrate the hallowed anniversary. 

 With flour and oil they made pancakes, washing them down with 

 wine saved from the day before and borrowed in advance from 

 the morrow. They elected a king by lot, the master gunner 



