This is a point outside the Arctic circle, but quite cold enough.

Of nights, with a good fire in the house they built, hoar frost covered their beds, and the cook's water in a metal pan before the fire was warm on one side and froze on the other.

Here "it snowed and froze extremely, at which time we, looking from the shore towards the ship, she appeared a piece of ice in the fashion of a ship, or a ship resembling a piece of ice." Here the gunner, who hand lost his leg, besought that, "for the little the he had to live, he might drink sack altogether." He died and was buried in the ice far from the vessel, but when afterwards two more were dead of scurvy, and the others, in a miserable state, were working with faint hope about their shattered vessel, the gunner was found to have returned home to the old vessel; his leg had penetrated through a port-hole.

They "digged him clear out, and he was as free from noisomeness," the record says, "as when we first committed him to the sea.

This alteration had the ice, and water, and time, only wrought on him, that his flesh would slip up and down upon his bones, like a glove on a man's hand.