The ships were embayed, sails lowered, rudders unshipped, and anchors put out for the night. Night did not mean dark. It meant the sunlight aslant the ice fields and pools in hues of fire that tinted the green waves and set rainbows playing in the spray. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead. Cascades tinkled over the ice walls. There was the deep stillness of twilight calm, then the quiver of the ship’s timbers forewarning the rising tide, then the long, low undertone of the ocean depths gathering might to hurl against the iron forces of the ice. The crews had been rambling over the ice but were now recalled to be on the watch as the tide rose. Some were at the windlass ready to heave anchors up at first opening of clear water; others ready to lower boats and tow from dangers; others again preparing blasts of powder to blow up the ice if the tide threatened to close the floes in a squeeze. Captain Ward’s men must have been out on the ice, for it happened in the twinkling of an eye as such wrecks always happened, and not a man was lost. Two icepans reared up, smashed together, crushed the frigate _Hudson’s Bay_, like an eggshell and she sank a water-logged wreck before their eyes. Ward’s crew were at once taken on board by Belcher, and when the ice loosened, carried on down to York and Albany. There was a lawsuit against the Company for the wages of these men wrecked outward bound and kept in idleness on the bay for thirteen months. The matter was compromised by the Company paying ten months’ wages instead of thirteen. * * * * * Captain Knight waited only long enough at Churchill to leave the fort provisions. Then he set out on his quest to the north. This could scarcely be described as foolhardy, for his ships carried the frames for houses to winter in the North. From this point on, the story must be pieced together of fragments. From the time Captain Knight left Churchill, in 1719, his journal ceases. No line more came from the game old pathfinder to the Company. The year 1719 passed, 1720, 1721, still no word of him. Surely, he must have passed through the Straits of Anian to the South Sea and would presently come home from Asia laden with spices and gold dust for the Company. But why didn’t he send back one of the little whaling boats to Churchill with word of his progress; or why didn’t some of the men come down from the whaling station he was to establish at Chesterfield Inlet? Henry Kelsey takes a cruise on the sloop _Prosperous_ from York, in 1719, but finds no trace of him. Hancock has been cruising the whaling seas on _The Success_ that same summer, but he learns nothing of Knight. The whole summer of 1721, while whaling, Kelsey is on the lookout for the peaked sails of Knight’s ships; but he sees never a sail. Napper is sent out again on the sloop _Success_, but he runs amuck of a reef four days from Nelson River and loses his ship and almost his life.