The New Year found them still imprisoned, "with great cold, danger, and disease." January, February, March, April passed and still the little ship was stuck fast in the ice. But as the sun began to gain power, hope revived, and they began to repair their boats, to make new sails, and repair tackle. They were too weak and ill to do much work, but by the middle of June the boats were fairly ready and they could cut a way through the ice to the open sea. This was their only hope of escape, to leave the ship behind and embark 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