As soon as the shallop could be floated, a larger expedition was sent by water along the south coast to seek a permanent settlement. Through wind and snow the Pilgrim Fathers made their way up to Pamet River, in Truro, the limit of the earlier journey. They did not succeed in agreeing upon a fit site for the colony, but they sought out the corn deposit and, breaking the frozen ground with their swords, secured ten bushels more of priceless seed for the springtime. On the return of the second expedition there was anxious discussion about the best course to pursue. Some were for settling on the Cape and living by the fisheries, pointing out, to emphasize their arguments, the whales that sported every day about the anchored ship; but the Pilgrims were of agricultural habit and tradition and had reason enough just then to be weary of the sea. The situation was critical. “The heart of winter and unseasonable weather,” wrote Bradford, “was come upon us.” The gradual slope of the beach made it always necessary to “wade a bow-shoot or two” in going ashore from the _Mayflower_, and these icy foot-baths were largely responsible for the “vehement coughs” from which hardly one of the company was exempt. Once more, on the 16th of December, the shallop started forth to find a home for the Pilgrims. Ten colonists, including Carver, Bradford and Standish, together with a few men of the ship’s crew, volunteered for this service. It was so cold that the sleety spray glazed doublet and jerkin “and made them many times like coats of iron.” The voyagers landed within the present limits of Eastham or Orleans, where, hard by the shore, a camp was roughly barricaded. One day passed safely in exploration, but at dawn of the second, when, “after prayer,” the English sat about their camp-fire at breakfast, “a great and strange cry” cut the mist, and on the instant Indian arrows, headed with deer-horn and eagles’ claws, whizzed about their heads. But little Captain Standish was not to be caught napping. “Having a snaphance ready,” he fired in direction of the war-whoop. His comrades supported him manfully, their friends in the shallop, themselves beset, shouted encouragement, and the savages, gliding back among the trees, melted into “the dark of the morning.” After this taste of Cape Cod courtesy, the Pilgrim Fathers can hardly be blamed for taking to their shallop again and plunging on, in a stiff gale, through the toppling waves, until, with broken rudder and mast split in three, they reached a refuge in the harbor of Plymouth.