in two little open
boats for the open sea.

"Then William Barents wrote a letter, which he put into a musket's
charge and hanged it up in the chimney, showing how we came out of
Holland to sail to the kingdom of China, and how we had been forced
in our extremity to make that house and had dwelt ten months therein,
and how we were forced to put to sea in two small open boats, for that
the ship lay fast in the ice."

Barents himself was now too ill to walk, so they carried him to one
of the little boats, and on 14th June 1597 the little party put off
from their winter quarters and sailed round to Ice Point. But the pilot
was dying. "Are we about Ice Point?" he asked feebly. "If we be, then
I pray you lift me up, for I must view it once again."

Then suddenly the wind began to rise, driving the ice so fast upon
them "that it made our hair stand upright upon our heads, it was so
fearful to behold, so that we thought verily that it was a foreshadowing
of our last end."

They drew the boats up on to the ice and lifted the sick commander
out and laid him on the icy ground, where a few days later he died--"our
chief guide and only pilot on whom we reposed ourselves next under
God." The rest of the story is soon told.

On 1st November 1597 some twelve gaunt and haggard men, still wearing
caps of white fox and coats of bearskin, having guided their little
open boats all the way from Nova Zembla, arrived at Amsterdam and told
the story of their exploration to the astonished merchants, who had
long since given them up as dead.

It was not till 1871 that Barents' old winter quarters on Nova Zembla
were discovered. "There stood the cooking-pans over the fireplace,
the old clocks against the wall, the arms, the tools, the drinking
vessels, the instruments and the books that had beguiled the weary
hours of that long night, two hundred and seventy-eight years ago."
Among the relics were a pair of small shoes and a flute which had
belonged to a little cabin-boy who had died during the winter.

CHAPTER XXXVII

HUDSON FINDS HIS BAY

Henry Hudson was another victim to perish in the hopeless search for
a passage to China by the north. John Davis had been dead two years,
but not till after he had piloted the first expedition undertaken by
the newly formed East India Company for commerce with India and the
East. It was now more important than ever to find a short way to these
countries other than round by the Cape of Good H