THEIR RECEPTION. 
439 
the gangway, and, as I was about to challenge, one of 
them sprang forward and grasped my hand. It was 
Doctor Hayes. A few words, dictated ly suffering, 
certainly not by any anxiety as to his reception, and 
at his bidding the whole party came upon deck. Poor 
fellows! I could only grasp their hands and give them 
a brother’s welcome. 
“The thermometer was at minus 50°; they were 
covered with rime and snow, and were fainting with 
hunger. It was necessary to use caution in taking 
them below; for, after an exposure of such fearful 
intensity and duration as they had gone through, the 
warmth of the cabin would have prostrated them com¬ 
pletely. They had journeyed three hundred and fifty 
miles; and their last run from the bay near Etah, some 
seventy miles in a right line, was through the hum¬ 
mocks at this appalling temperature. 
“One by one they all came in and were housed. 
Poor fellows! as they threw open their Esquimaux 
garments by the stove, how they relished the scanty 
luxuries which we had to offer them! The coffee and 
the meat-biscuit soup, and the molasses and the wheat 
bread, even the salt pork which our scurvy forbade the 
rest of us to touch,—how they relished it all! For 
more than two months they had lived on frozen seal 
and walrus-meat. 
“They are almost all of them in danger of collapse, 
but I have no apprehension of life unless from tetanus. 
Stephenson is prostrate with pericarditis. I resigned 
my own bunk to Dr. Hayes, who is much prostrated: 
