Two days later, there was a cry of “Sail Ho!” and the little fleet pursued an American privateer towing a British captive. The privateer cuts the tow rope and shows heels to the sea. Darkness falls, and when morning comes neither captive nor captor is in sight. The passage is swift across a remarkably easy sea--good winds, no gales, no plots, no mutinies; and the ships are in the straits of Hudson’s Bay by the end of July; but typhus fever has broken out on _The Prince of Wales_. Daily the bodies of the dead are lowered over decks to a watery grave. At the straits the boat with the Moravian missionaries strikes south for Labrador. August 12th, the other ships run up the narrow rock-girt harbor of Churchill, past the stone-walled ruins of the fort destroyed by La Perouse to the new modern fur post. It is not deemed wise to keep the ill and the well together. The former are given quarters under sheeting tents in the ruins of the old stone fort. The rest go on by land and boat south to York. The forests that used to surround Churchill have been burnt back for twenty miles, and when the fever patients recover, they retreat to the woods for the winter; all but the old couple who winter in the stone fort whose ruins are typical of their own lives. Fine weather favors the settlers’ journey south, though this wilderness travel with ridge stones that cut their feet and swamps to mid-waist, gives them a foretaste of the trail leading to their Promised Land. Fifty miles distant from York, they run short of food and must boil nettle leaves; but hunger spurs speed. Next night they are on the shores of Nelson River round a huge bonfire kindled to signal York Fort for boats to ferry the Nelson.