and cold, and wretchedness, and misery, unless we believe in Jesus, who will preserve us, and keep us, and bring us to be for ever with himself, where there is no pain, but fulness of joy for evermore.”  Still, on the succeeding day, the weather not abating, the party were detained at the station, which the increasing scarcity of food rendered now doubly uncomfortable; the brethren were obliged to be on the watch whenever they eat, lest the Esquimaux should snatch the scanty morsel from them, which now consisted of only one meal a day.  “One can hardly conceive,” say they in their journal, “what we endured:  we had no rest neither night nor day; when we lay down to sleep and gat warm, we were almost devoured with vermin; when we sat up during the day, we were almost suffocated with stench and smoke.”

At length a sledge, which had been sent off to the whale, returned laden with fat and flesh, which afforded relief from the pressure of hunger, “and made,” say the missionaries, “all our hearts leap for joy;” and on the succeeding day, the whole party set off for the whale.  When they reached it they found it of the middling size, about sixty-four feet long, but covered with ice and snow almost a fathom deep.  The Esquimaux, however, crept into the mouth and cut off what they wanted from the interior to supply themselves; but the wants of the brethren were only increased, they could make little use of such flesh, and they were without wood to dress it, had it been even more palatable.  They had no shelter but a snow-house, which they constructed with the help of the Esquimaux.  The women, however, had forgotten their lamps, and the brethren had no resource for rendering their habitation comfortable, but to construct a kind of temporary lamp from a piece of whale’s flesh, into which they cut a hole and put a piece of moss, and then to kindle it, but the smoke and disagreeable smell were insupportable; they also suffered greatly from the want of water, as they could get nothing to drink but ice or snow melted, which was done in a manner that in other circumstances would have proved an absolute prohibition against tasting it—­the Esquimaux filled their gloves with snow, or put it in the intestines of the seals which they had wrapped round them, and the natural heat of the body reduced into a state of liquifaction—­yet even this they were happy to procure.

Amid these hardships Haven was seized with a violent pain in his side, which the Esquimaux, who greatly loved him, much lamented, as they said it was the disease that carried off so many of their countrymen.  Peaceful, however, in the hour of his suffering, the missionary was enabled to testify to the heathen that death for him had no terrors; nor was it to be dreaded by those who believed in the Saviour.  They showed their affection by procuring, with much difficulty, a lamp and some skins on which they placed the invalid, and by the blessing of God, the heat effected his cure.  The brethren now began to try to hew down the frozen whale, but the want of food had so enfeebled them that they found themselves wholly unequal to the task, and were forced to give it up and return home, worn out with the fatigue they had endured, and without effecting their object.