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