The bears afforded them some fresh meat up till November 3, when they and the sun disappeared at one and the same time. After this they occasionally succeeded in trapping foxes, but the cold was so intense that they were often unable to venture out of the house for days together. “It blew so hard and snowed so fast,” writes Gerrit de Veer, the chronicler of the expedition, “that we should have smothered if we had gone out into the air; and to speake truth, it had not been possible for any man to have gone one ship’s length, though his life had laine thereon; for it was not possible for us to go out of the house. One of our men made a hole open at one of our doores ... but found it so hard wether that he stayed not long, and told us that it had snowed so much that the snow lay higher than our house.” Again, “It frose so hard that as we put a nayle into our mouths (as when men worke carpenter’s worke they use to doe), there would ice hang thereon when we tooke it out againe, and made the blood follow.” Or, “It was so extreme cold that the fire almost caste no heate; for as we put our feete to the fire, we burnt our stockings before we could feele the heate.... And, which is more, if we had not sooner smelt than felt them, we should have burnt them quite away ere we had knowne it.” De Veer also tells us that the clothes on the backs even of those who sat near the fire were frequently covered with hoar-frost, and that the beer and all the spirits were frozen solid. Yet in the midst of all this he was able to make the following entry in his journal: “We alwaies trusted in God that hee would deliver us from thence towards sommer time either one way or another.... We comforted each other giving God thanks that the hardest time of the winter was passed, being in good hope that we should live to talke of those things at home in our owne country.” It was in this spirit of patient resignation that the brave Dutchmen met all their troubles.