276 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
house. In its neighbourhood a man was overtaken by such 
a storm of drifting snow while hunting a reindeer. When he 
did not return after two days’ absence it was determined to note 
him in the journal as having “perished without burial.” 
On the |th April, 1769, there was a storm from the south¬ 
west, with mist, rain, and hail as large as half a bullet. On the 
snd^u ^ dreadful wind raged from the north-west, bringing from 
the high mountains a “sharp smoke-like air,”—it was certainly 
a fdlin wind. The painful, depressing effect of this wind is generally 
known from Switzerland and from north-western Greenland. 
At the latter place it rushes right down with excessive violence 
from the ice-desert of the interior. But far from on that 
account bringing cold with it, the temperature suddenly rises 
above the freezing-point, the snow disappears as if by magic 
through melting and evaporation, and men and animals feel 
themselves suffering from the sudden change in the weather. 
Such winds besides occur everywhere in the Polar regions in the 
neighbourhood of high mountains, and it is probably on their 
account that a stay in the hill-enclosed kettle-valleys is in 
Greenland considered to be very unhealthy and to lead to 
attacks of scurvy among the inhabitants. 
The crew remained during the winter whole days, indeed 
whole weeks in succession, in their confined dwellings, carefully 
made tight, without taking any regular exercise in the open air. 
We can easily understand from this that they could not escape 
scurvy, by which most of them appear to have been attacked, 
and of which seven died, among them Tschirakin. It is sur¬ 
prising that any one of them could survive with such a mode ol 
life during the dark Polar night. The brewing of qtmss, the 
daily baking of bread, and perhaps even the vapour-baths, mainly 
contributed to this. 
On the fath July the ice on Matotschkin Schar broke up, and 
on the 2 ^ August the sound was completely free of ice. An 
attempt was now made to continue the voyage across the Kara 
