"For many hours we had been without food, and now examination proved that, save a few biscuits in the cabin locker, all the bread on board had been destroyed by the salt water; yet Urbain Gautier was able to make a meal of it. We were forced to content ourselves with a half biscuit each, to be eaten at our first halting place on shore. Beef or other provision we had none, and not a drop of rum or any other liquid could be had, for the brig was going fast to pieces, as the breakers surged up under her weather-counter, and all the hull abaft the mainmast was settling rapidly down in the water. "Luckily we got up six muskets and some dry ammunition through the skylight. I say luckily, as we would have to hunt our way to Buenoventura; and these, with two tin pannikins, wherewith to cook and melt the snow for water, and a box of lucifer matches for lighting fires when we squatted in the bush for the night, we made our way ashore in the quarter-boat, and landed a chilled, wan, haggard, and miserable little band, consisting of eleven persons in all, including the captain, Bob Jenner, Tom Dacres, Willy Ormiston, the boy, myself, and five others. "We were not without some fears of the Red Indians, though few or none, I believe, are now to be found on the island. Thus our first proceeding was to load and cap our muskets carefully.[*] [*] It was a tradition, when the author was there, that in 1810 an exploring party, under Lieutenant Buchan, R.N., was sent to cultivate friendship with the Red Indians, and left with them, as hostages, two marines. Returning to the Bay of Exploits (about seventy miles westward from Bloody Bay) next summer, he found the savages gone, and the headless remains of his two marines lying in the bush. "Captain Benson proceeded in front, with a fowling-piece on his shoulder, steering the way, with the aid of his pocket compass and a fragment of a chart; and he, too, was custodian of our box of lucifer matches. Just as we reached the top of the cliffs, by a slippery and dangerous ascent, we heard a sound, which made us all pause and look back towards the wreck. The field ice had already closed in upon the reef; but the last vestiges of the brig had disappeared where the Baccalieu birds were whirling thickest and screaming loudest. "From the cliff that overlooked the sea, which was covered to the horizon with a myriad hummocks of field ice, diversified here and there by a great iceberg, the view landward differed but little in aspect. The whole dreary expanse was covered with snow—snow that made the frozen lakes and bays so blend with the land, that save for the dark groves of stunted firs and dwarf brushwood that grew in the arid soil, it was difficult to know where one ended and the other began. The hills were low, monotonous, and unpleasantly resembled icebergs, without possessing the altitude, the sharp peaks, and abrupt outlines of the latter.