That is all that Prickett tells about their wintering; but what he
leaves untold, as "too tedious," easily may be filled in. Beginning
with that brabble over the "gray cloth gowne," there must have gone
on in Hudson's party the same bickerings and wranglings that went
on in Greely's party, and the same development of small animosities
into burning hatreds. And it all, with Hudson's people, must have
been rougher and fiercer and deadlier than it was with Greely's
people: because Hudson's crew was of a time when sea-men, for
cause, were called sea-wolves; while Greely's crew was the better
(yet exhibited scant evidence of it) by an additional two centuries
and a half of civilization, and was made up (though with little to
show for it) of picked men.




XII


The end came in the spring-time. Through the winter the party had
"such store of fowle," and later had for a while so good a supply
of fish, that starvation was staved off. When the ice broke up,
about the middle of June, Hudson sailed from his winter quarters
and went out a little way into Hudson's Bay. There they were caught
and held in the floating ice--with their stores almost exhausted,
and with no more fowl nor fish to be had. Then the nip of hunger
came; and with it came openly the mutiny that secretly had been
fermenting through those months of cold and gloom.

Prickett writes: "Being thus in the ice on Saturday, the one and