Dr. Kane confronted the winter with equal sagacity and resolution. He had carefully studied the Eskimos, and concluded that their form of habitation and peculiarities of diet, without their unthrift and filth, were the safest that could be adopted. He turned the brig, therefore, into a kind of _igloë_, or hut. The quarter-deck was well padded with moss and turf, and the cabin below, a space some eighteen feet square, was enclosed and packed from floor to ceiling with inner walls of the same material. The floor itself was carefully calked with plaster of Paris and common paste, and covered two inches deep with Manilla oakum and a canvas carpet. The entrance was from the hold by a low, moss-lined tunnel, the _tossut_ of the native huts, with as many doors and curtains to close it up as ingenuity could devise. This was their sitting-room, dining-room, sleeping-room; but there were only ten of them, and the closer the warmer. [Illustration: DR. KANE PAYING A VISIT TO AN ESKIMO HUT AT ETAH.] While they were engaged in these defences against the enemy, they contrived to open up a friendly intercourse with the Eskimos, visiting them in their snow-huts at the settlements of Etah and Anatoak, distant about thirty and seventy miles from the brig; and, in return for presents of needles, pins, and knives, they undertook to show the white strangers where game was to be procured, as well as to furnish walrus and fresh seal meat. The assistance rendered by the Eskimos was of the greatest value, and we may infer that, without it, Dr. Kane and his followers must have succumbed to the hardships of that dreadful winter. * * * * * On the 12th of December, the party which had abandoned the ship suddenly reappeared, finding it impossible to penetrate to the south. They had suffered severely; were covered with rime and snow, and fainting with hunger. It was necessary to use much caution in conveying them below; for after an exposure of such fearful intensity and duration as they had undergone, the warmth of the cabin would have prostrated them completely. They had journeyed three hundred and fifty miles; and their last run from the bay near Etah, some seventy miles in a right line, was through the hummocks with the thermometer at -50°. “One by one,” says Kane, “they all came in and were housed. Poor fellows! as they threw open their Eskimo garments by the stove, how they relished the scanty luxuries which we had to offer. The coffee, and the meat-biscuit soup, and the molasses, and the wheat-bread, even the salt pork, which our scurvy forbade the rest of us to touch--how they relished it all! For more than two months they had lived on frozen seal and walrus meat.” We cannot dwell on the various little incidents which marked that sad and terrible winter, but an extract or two from Dr. Kane’s journal will show the reader how much the imprisoned explorers endured, and in what spirit they bore their trials:--