On the 9th of October De Long sent two of the seamen, Nindemann and Noros, ahead in search of relief. They had no food but what they could find, and on the second day out their dinner consisted of a little willow tea and a burnt boot sole. Next morning they burnt another sole of a boot, and they spent the day struggling through a morass in drifting snow, crossing streams of all sizes, and halting for the night in so high a wind that they were unable to light a fire and took refuge in a hole in the snow from which they emerged with difficulty in the morning, owing to the wind having piled up the snow against the opening. At the end of the third day they reached a deserted hut in which were some deer bones, which they grilled and tried to eat, and in the morning a gale was blowing and the wild drifting snow was so thick that they had to remain where they were and continue their diet of charred bones and willow tea. Next day, Thursday, the 13th of October, they began against a strong head wind. In the afternoon they sighted a hut on the west bank of the river. "They had seen one in the morning, but had in vain attempted to cross the ice to it. Now they tried to reach this, but were turned back by the brittle ice. They kept it in sight as they moved southward, and made another attempt to cross the ice, but it broke and they came back. Then they saw that there was no further progress possible to the southward on that side of the water, and they returned to the ice. It broke again, but they kept on. They went in up to their waists, but managed to pull themselves up on the stronger ice." The wind was blowing against them and the ice was like glass, so that they were driven back. They looked about for ice which had been roughened by the ripples beneath, and finding some they succeeded at length in reaching the other side, where were two wooden crosses beneath a bank, which rose fifty feet above them. They pulled themselves up the bank, but when they came to the hut which they had kept in sight they found it a ruin nearly full of snow. "While Noros was trying to make a place in it for shelter, Nindemann saw a black object farther along to the south and went to it. It was a small peaked hut without a door, but large enough to hold two men. There were some fresh wood shavings outside the hut and higher up on the hill two boxes. On going to them Nindemann found them old and decayed, and he began to break one of them open. When he had ripped off the top he discovered that there was another box enclosed; breaking into it he found a dead body, and hastily left it. Doubtless the two crosses below on the river bank were memorials of the two beings left high up above the reach of the floods."