It need scarcely be told—these were Knight’s treasure-seekers, wrecked without saving a pound of provisions on an island bare as a billiard ball twenty miles from the mainland. How did the crews pass that winter? Their only food must have been such wild cranberries as they could gather under the drifting snows, arctic hares, snowbirds, perhaps the carcass of an occasional dead porpoise or whale. When the Indians came back in the summer of 1720, there were very few whitemen left, but there was a great number of graves—graves scooped out of drift sand with bowlders for a tombstone. The survivors seemed to be starving. They fell like wild beasts on the raw seal meat and whale oil that the Eskimos gave them. They seemed to be trying to make a boat out of the driftwood that had been left of that winter’s fuel. The next time the Eskimos visited the castaways, there were only two men alive. These were demented with despair, passing the time weeping and going to the highest rock on the island to watch for a sail at sea. Their clothes had been worn to tatters. They were clad in the skins of the chase and looked like madmen. From the Indians’ account, it was now two years from the time of the wreck. What ammunition had been saved from the ships, must have been almost exhausted. How these two men kept life in their bodies for two winters in the most bitterly cold, exposed part of Hudson Bay, huddling in their snow-buried hut round fires of moss and driftwood, with the howling north wind chanting the death song of the winding sheet, and the scream of the hungry were-wolf borne to their ears in the storm—can better be imagined than described.