516                             CONCLUSION.
and could hardly have been blowing long. They harnessed in their dogs, urged them to their utmost speed, and made for the land they had left. Too late! a yawning chasm of open water lay already between. A day was lost in frantic despair. It blew a gale, an offshore southeaster. The fog rose, the wind still from the east: the shore was gone.
The story is a wild one. They reharnessed the dogs, and turned to the west, one hundred and thirty trackless miles of ice before them. On the third day the dogs gave out: one of the lost men killed his fellow, and revived the animals with his flesh. The wretched survivor at last reached the North American shore about Merchant's Bay. Years afterward, this account came over by a circuitous channel to the Greenland settlement. He had married a new wife, had a new family, a new home, a new country, from which, had he desired it never so much, there could be for him no return.
The traditions of all the settlements have tales of similar disaster. Yet the Esquimaux are a happy race of people, happy so far as content and an elastic temperament go to make up happiness.
We left the settlements of Baffin's Bay on the 6th of September, 1851, grateful exceedingly to the kind-hearted officers of the Danish posts; and after a run of some twenty-four days, unmarked by incident, touched our native soil again at New York. Our noble friend, Henry Grinnell, was the first to welcome us on the pier-head.