ills, may now be identified as
Rupert Bay, in the south-east corner. The furious autumn winds bobbled
the little high-decked ship about on the water like a chip in a
maelstrom, and finally, with a ripping crash that tore timbers asunder,
sent her on the rocks, in the blackness of a November night. The
starving crew dashed up the hatchway to decks glassed with ice and
wrapped in the gloom of a snow-storm thick as wool. To any who have been
on that shore in a storm it is quite unnecessary to explain why it was
impossible to seek safety ashore by lowering a boat. Shallow seas always
beat to wilder turbulence in storm than do the great deeps. Even so do
shallow natures, and one can guess how the mutinous crew, stung into
unwonted fury by cold and despair, railed at Hudson with the rage of
panic-stricken hysteria. But in daylight and calm, presumably on the
morning of November 11, drenched and cold, they reached shore safely,
and knocked together, out of the tamarac and pines and rocks, some
semblance of winter cabins.

Of game there was abundance then, as now--rabbit and deer and grouse
enough to provision an army; and Hudson offered reward for all
provisions brought in. But the leaven of rebellion had worked its
mischief. The men would not hunt. Probably they did not know how.
Certainly none of them had ever before felt such cold as this--cold that
left the naked hand sticking to any metal that it touched, that filled
the air with frost fog and mock suns, that set the wet ship's timbers
crackling every night like musket shots, that left a lining of
hoar-frost and snow on the under side of the berth-beds, that burst the
great pines and fir trees ashore in loud nightly explosions, and set the
air whipping in lights of unearthly splendour that passed them moving
and rustling in curtains of blood and fire.[1] As anyone who has lived
in the region knows, the cowardly incompetents should have been up and
out hunting and wresting from nature the one means of protection against
northern cold--fur clothing. That is the one demand the North makes of
man--that he shall fight and strive for mastery; but these whimpering
weaklings, convulsed with the poison of self-pity, sat inside shivering
over the little pans and braziers of coal, cursing and cursing Hudson.

In the midst of the smouldering mutiny the ship's gunner died, and
probably because the gutter boy, Greene, was the most poorly clad of
all, Hudson gave the dead man's overcoa