A council was held, and it was decided that the strongest should take enough supplies to last them for a time and push forward as rapidly as possible, while the remainder should follow at a slower rate and by shorter stages. The majority were in the latter division, and only a few days elapsed after the smaller band, numbering about thirty, had left, before the ravages of scurvy and semi-starvation made it impossible for even less than five miles a day to be covered. So debilitated were all the members that further advance was abandoned until they had, by another long rest, tried to recuperate their energies. But the terrible bleakness of the place where they were wrought havoc among them, and every day men fell down never to rise again, until the only hope for the survivors lay in returning to the ships, where, at least, they would have shelter. Wearily they staggered over the rugged ice ridges, each man expending his remaining energies in striving to carry the provisions, without which only death awaited them. Men fell as they walked, unnoticed by their companions, whose only aim was to get back to the ships, and whose faculties were too dimmed to understand anything else. Blindly, but doggedly, they stumbled onward, silent in their agony, brave to the last when worn-out nature gave way and they sank down, one after the other, till none was left alive, and only the still figures, lying face downwards on the frozen snow, bore mute witness of how they had neither faltered nor wavered in their duty, but had died, as Britons always should die, true to the end. Their comrades who had left them to push forward for help were equally stolid in their struggle against overwhelming odds. As they were crossing the ice between King William's Land and the mainland, a great cracking of the floes startled them with the fear that the ice was breaking up. Hastily placing their stores in the whale-boat, which they had been dragging in addition to the hand-sledges, they abandoned everything else, fearful lest the sudden opening of the floes might cut them off from a further advance. Harnessing themselves to ropes, they toiled and struggled onward with the boat. They reached the mainland, but at a terrible sacrifice, for in their haste they had left much of their scanty supplies behind. Their food ran out and hope was almost dead, when they espied a small camp of Eskimo.