Now their trials began. The way to Frobisher’s “straits” was found to be “choked up” with “many walles, mountaines, and bulwarks of yce.” Off the Foreland and, as they supposed, about the entrance to the “straits” they were buffeted by high winds and “forced many times to stemme and strike great rockes” of ice. Soon the fleet was dispersed. The “Judith,” carrying the lieutenant-general, Fenton, disappeared. The “Michael” had been early lost from sight by her companion ships. Of those which remained in company the bark “Dennis” shortly foundered, having received a crushing blow against a rock of ice. As she took the blow she signalled her danger by a shot from her great gun, and, fortunately, such quick aid was rendered by the other ships with their shipboats that all her men were saved. With her went down a part of the frame of the house to be erected for the band assigned to winter at Meta Incognita. Next a savage tempest suddenly arose, blowing from the sea “directly upon the place of the straits,” and various devices had to be resorted to to save the ships from destruction. Some getting a little sea room took in sails and drifted. Some were moored to great “islands of ice” and rode under their lee. Others were so shut in that they were at the mercy of the ice. To break its force, “junckes [junks] of cables, beds, masts, planks” were hung over their sides, while the mariners stood for hours beating it off with pikes, oars, and pieces of timber. Four—the “Anne Francis,” Best’s ship, the “Moone,” the “Francis of Foy,” and the “Gabriel”—being farthest from shore, and fast sailers, weathered the tempest under sail; and by noon the next day they had got off at sea clear of ice. And here by night of the following day they were joined by the rest of the fleet, which had escaped with a turn of the wind that had broken their ice barriers. Now joyous in fellowship again, they all “played off” more to seaward, there to abide till the ice had further cleared from before the entrance to their “straits.”