M’Clure was now faced by a very difficult problem. In the first place, his pride and his sense of duty bade him to save his ship, which was still in perfect condition. In the second place, he felt that he could hardly ask his men to stay by him on the chance of release in the following summer. His solution of the problem cannot be regarded as entirely satisfactory. Calling his men on to the quarter deck one day in the early winter, he told them that he had decided that, as soon as spring came round, he would send away half of the crew in two divisions. One of these was to make for the mouth of Prince of Wales’ Strait, where he had left a boat, and thence to the coast of America, while the other was to march for Wellington Channel, where, he hoped, that they would be picked up by a whaler. Armstrong knew that the men were quite unfit for such a journey, and told his commander so in no uncertain terms, but without producing the least effect. M’Clure was an incurable optimist and never could be induced to believe that his men were not capable of performing the impossible, so, with a view to ensuring a fairly adequate supply of provisions for the travelling parties, he cut down the rations once more. The result was that the whole crew lived in a state of perpetual hunger. The scurvy patients grew worse and those who had, up to the present, remained healthy, sickened rapidly. To add to their discomforts, the winter was one of the coldest on record, and on one occasion the thermometer registered ninety-nine degrees of frost. Unfit though his men were for the service he contemplated for them, M’Clure set about making the final preparations for the expeditions. These were sufficiently extraordinary to startle even Dr Armstrong, accustomed as he was to his leader’s vagaries, for M’Clure informed him one day that it was his intention to dispatch the weaker half of the crew from the vessel and bade him make the necessary selection. Armstrong could only do as he was told, and, with a sad heart, he picked out thirty of the most scorbutic members of the ship’s company, and told them off into two divisions of fifteen each. As a final protest against what he evidently considered to be little short of murder, he and his assistant, Mr Piers, recorded in a letter their conviction that the men could not survive such a journey. This, however, had as little effect as his earlier representations.