On the 15th August they reached the isles of Orange, on the extreme north-eastern verge of Nova Zembla.  Here a party going ashore climbed to the top of a rising ground, and to their infinite delight beheld an open sea entirely free from ice, stretching to the S. E. and E.S.E. as far as eye could reach.  At last the game was won, the passage to Cathay was discovered.  Full of joy, they pulled back in their boat to the ship, “not knowing how to get there quick enough to tell William Barendz.”  Alas! they were not aware of the action of that mighty ocean river, the Gulf-stream, which was sweeping around those regions with its warm dissolving current.

Three days later they returned baffled in their sanguine efforts to sail through the open sea.  The ice had returned upon them, setting southwardly in obedience to the same impulse which for a moment had driven it away, and they found themselves imprisoned again near the “Hook of Desire.”

On the 25th August they had given up all the high hopes by which they had been so lately inspired, and, as the stream was again driving the ice from the land, they trusted to sail southward and westward back towards the Waigats.  Having passed by Nova Zembla, and found no opening into the seas beyond, they were disposed in the rapidly waning summer to effect their retreat by the south side of the island, and so through the Straits of Nassau home.  In vain.  The catastrophe was upon them.  As they struggled slowly past the “Ice-haven,” the floating mountains and glaciers, impelled by the mighty current, once more gathered around and forced them back to that horrible harbour.  During the remaining days of August the ship struggled, almost like a living creature, with the perils that, beset her; now rearing in the air, her bows propped upon mighty blocks, till she absolutely sat erect upon her stern, now lying prostrate on her side, and anon righting again as the ice-masses would for a moment float away and leave her breathing space and room to move in.  A blinding snow-storm was raging the while, the ice was cracking and groaning in all directions, and the ship was shrieking, so that the medley of awful sights and sounds was beyond the power of language. “’Twas enough to make the hair stand on end,” said Gerrit de Veer, “to witness the hideous spectacle.”

But the agony was soon over.  By the 1st September the ship was hard and fast.  The ice was as immoveable as the dry land, and she would not move again that year even if she ever floated.  Those pilgrims from the little republic were to spend the winter in their arctic harbour.  Resigning themselves without a murmur to their inevitable fate, they set about their arrangements with perfect good humour and discipline.  Most fortunately a great quantity of drift wood, masses of timber, and great trees torn away with their roots from distant shores, lay strewn along the coast, swept thither by the wandering currents.  At once they resolved to build a house in which they might shelter themselves from the wild beasts, and from their still more cruel enemy, the cold.  So thanking God for the providential and unexpected supply of building material and fuel, they lost no time in making sheds, in hauling timber, and in dragging supplies from the ship before the dayless winter should descend upon them.