On the twenty-third they were wrapped in thick fog and lay firing guns, ringing bells, and beating drums to prevent collisions. When the weather cleared, they looked in vain for the admiral’s ship, the “Northumberland.”[182] She was not lost, however, but with two other ships was far ahead of the fleet and near Chibucto, though in great perplexity, having no pilot who knew the coast. She soon after had the good fortune to capture a small English vessel with a man on board well acquainted with Chibucto harbor. D’Anville offered him his liberty and a hundred louis if he would pilot the ship in. To this he agreed; but when he rejoined his fellow-prisoners they called him a 161 traitor to his country, on which he retracted his promise. D’Anville was sorely perplexed; but Duperrier, captain of the “Northumberland,” less considerate of the prisoner’s feelings, told him that unless he kept his word he should be thrown into the sea, with a pair of cannon-balls made fast to his feet. At this his scruples gave way, and before night the “Northumberland” was safe in Chibucto Bay. D’Anville had hoped to find here the four ships of Conflans, which were to have met him from the West Indies at this, the appointed rendezvous; but he saw only a solitary transport of his own fleet. Hills covered with forests stood lonely and savage round what is now the harbor of Halifax. Conflans and his four ships had arrived early in the month, and finding nobody, though it was nearly three months since D’Anville left Rochelle, he cruised among the fogs for a while, and then sailed for France a few days before the admiral’s arrival. D’Anville was ignorant of the fate of his fleet; but he knew that the two ships which had reached Chibucto with him were full of sick men, that their provisions were nearly spent, and that there was every reason to believe such of the fleet as the storm might have spared to be in no better case. An officer of the expedition describes D’Anville as a man “made to command and worthy to be loved,” and says that he had borne the disasters of the voyage with the utmost fortitude and serenity.[183] Yet suspense and distress wrought fatally upon him, and 162 at two o’clock in the morning of the twenty-seventh he died,--of apoplexy, by the best accounts; though it was whispered among the crews that he had ended his troubles by poison.[184]