After parting from the disabled _Eaglet_, _The Nonsuch_ had driven ahead for Hudson Straits, which she missed by going too far north to Baffin’s Land, but came to the entrance on the 4th of August. Owing to the lateness of the season, the straits were free of ice and _The Nonsuch_ made a quick passage for those days, reaching Digges’ Island, at the west end of the straits on the 19th of August. Groseillers and Gillam then headed south for that rendezvous at the lower end of the bay, where the two Frenchmen had found “a house all battered with bullets,” five years before, and had set up their own marks. Slow and careful search of the east coast must have been made, for _The Nonsuch_ was seven weeks cruising the seven hundred miles from Digges’ Island to that River Nemisco, which had seemed to flow from the country of the St. Lawrence or New France. Here they cast anchor on September 25, naming the river Rupert in honor of their patron. Beaching the ship on the sand-bars at high tide, the crew threw logs about her to fend off ice jams and erected slab palisades round two or three log huts for the winter—a fort named after King Charles. Weather favored _The Nonsuch’s_ crew. The south end of Hudson Bay often has snow in October, and nearly always ice is formed by November. This year, the harbor did not freeze till the 9th of December, but when the frost did come it was a thing to paralyze these Englishmen used to a climate where a pocketful of coal heats a house. The silent pine forests, snow-padded and snow-wreathed; the snow-cones and snow-mushrooms and snow-plumes bending the great branches with weight of snow like feathers; the icy particles that floated in the air; ice fog, diamond-sharp in sunshine and starlight but ethereal as mist, morning and evening; the whooping and romping and stamping and cannon-shot reports of the frost at night when the biggest trees snapped brittle and the earth seemed to groan with pain; the mystic mock-suns that shone in the heavens foreboding storm, and the hoot and shout and rush of the storm itself through the forests like the Indians’ Thunder Bird on the wings of the wind; the silences, the awful silences, that seemed to engulf human presence as the frost-fog closed mistily through the aisled forests—all these things were new and wondrous to the English crew. It was—as Gillam’s journal records—as if all life “had been frozen to death.” And then the marvel of the frost world, frost that fringed your eyelashes and hair with breath as you spoke, and drew ferns on the glazed parchment of the port windows, and created two inches of snow on the walls inside the ship! Snow fell—fell—fell, day after day, week after week, muffling, dreamy, hypnotic as the frost sleep.