On the 18th of June, they were able to walk out at ebb tide to the ships on the flats. By the 26th they could take broth made of fish and fresh partridge. “In the name of Jesus after prayer and supplication to God, we set to work to rig _The Lamprey_,” records Munck. The dead were thrown overboard. So were all ballast and cargo. Consequently, when the tide came in, the sloop was so light it floated free above the ice-break of rocks and logs constructed the year before. Munck then had holes drilled in the hull of _The Unicorn_ to sink her till he could come back for the frigate with an adequate crew. “On the 16th of July,” writes Munck, just a year from the time they had entered Hudson Straits, “Sunday in the afternoon, we set sail from there in the name of God.” Neither a kingdom nor a Northwest Passage had they found for King Christian of Denmark, but only hardships unspeakable, the inevitable fate of every pioneer of the New World, as though Nature would test their mettle before she began rearing a new race of men, pioneers of a new era in the world’s long history. If it had been difficult for crews of sixty-five to navigate the ice floes, what was it for an emaciated crew of three? Forty miles out from Churchill, a polar bear strayed across the ice sniffing at _The Lamprey_ when the ship’s dog sprang over in pursuit with the bold spirit of the true Great Dane. Just then the ice floe parted from the sloop, and for two days they could hear the faithful dog howling behind in dismay. A gale came banging the ship against the ice and smashed the rudder, but Munck out with his grapnel, fastened _The Lamprey_ to the ice and drifted with the floe almost as far as the Straits. A month it took to cross the bay to Digges Island at the west end of the Straits. For a second time, the brave mariner worked his way through the Straits by the old trick of throwing out the grapnel and hauling himself along the floes. This time he was drifting _with_ the ice, not _against_ it, and the passage was easier. Once out of the Straits, such a gale was raging “_as would blow a man off his legs_,” records Munck, but the wind carried him forward. Off Shetland a ship was signaled for help, but the high seas prevented its approach and the little _Lamprey_ literally shot into a harbor of Norway, on September 20th. Not a soul was visible but a peasant, and Munck had to threaten to blow the fellow’s brains out before he would help to moor the ship. With the soil of Europe once more firmly under their feet, the poor Danes could no longer restrain their tears. They fell on their knees thanking God for the deliverance from “the icebergs and dreadful storms and foaming seas.” * * * * * [Illustration: Le Moyne d’Iberville’s French Rangers and Canadian Wood-runners Besieging Fort Nelson—photographed from the copy of La Potherie in Archives, Ottawa, Canada.]