utinous crews. In this grave crisis he did not temporize. For
cause, he disrated his chief officers: and so asserted in that
desolate place, as fearlessly as he would have asserted it in an
English harbor, that aboard his ship his will was law.

But his strong action only scotched the mutiny. Prickett's
narrative of the doings of the ensuing seven weeks deals with what
he implies was purposeless sailing up and down James Bay. He casts
reflections upon Hudson's seamanship in such phrases as "our Master
would have the anchor up, against the mind of all who knew what
belongeth thereto"; and in all that he writes there is a
perceptible note of resentment of the Master's doings that reflects
the mutinous feeling on board. Especially does this feeling show in
his account of their settling into winter quarters: "Having spent
three moneths in a labyrinth without end, being now the last of
October, we went downe to the East, to the bottome of the Bay; but
returned without speeding of that we went for. The next day we went
to the South and South West, and found a place, whereunto we
brought our ship and haled her aground. And this was the first of
November. By the tenth thereof we were frozen in."

And then the Arctic night closed down upon them: and with it the
certainty that they were prisoners in that desolate freezing
darkness until the sun should come again and set them free.

XI

Nerves go to pieces in the Arctic. Captain Back, who commanded the
"Terror" on her first northern voyage (1836), has told how there
comes, as the icy night drags on, "a weariness of heart, a blank
feeling, which gets the better of the whole man"; and Colonel
Brainard, of the Greely expedition, wrote: "Take any set of men,
however carefully selected, and let them be thrown as intimately
together as are the members of an exploring expedition--hearing the
same voices, seeing the same faces, day after day--and they will
soon become weary of one another's society and impatient of one
another's faults."

The Greely expedition--composed of twenty-five men, of whom
only seven were found alive by the rescue party--in many ways
parallels, and pointedly illustrates, the Hudson expedition.
There was dissension in Greely's command almost from the start.
Surgeon Pavy's angry protests compelled the sending back in
the "Proteus"--paralleling the sending back of Coleburne
in the pink--of one member of the company; and Lieutenant
Kislingbury--paralle