had encountered fair weather, and it had reached Hamilton
Inlet in ten days without mishap, and with the men and animals in the
best of condition. At Rigolet the men had disembarked and loaded their
howitzers, mules, and supplies upon the flat-bottomed barges brought
with them for that purpose. Thirty French and Indian guides had been
engaged, and five days later the expedition, towed by the powerful motor
launches, had started up the river toward the chain of lakes lying
northwest toward Ungava. Every one was in the best of spirits and
everything moved with customary German precision like clockwork. Nothing
had been forgotten, not even the pungent invention of a Berlin chemist
to discourage mosquitoes. Without labour, without anxiety, the fourteen
barges bored through the swift currents and at last reached a great lake
that lay like a silver mirror for miles about them. The moon rose and
turned the boats into weird shapes as they ploughed through the gray
mists--a strange and terrible sight for the Nascopees lurking in the
underbrush along the shore. And while the men smoked and sang "Die Wacht
am Rhein," listening to the trill of the ripples against the bows, the
foremost motorboat grounded.

The momentum of the barge immediately following could not be checked,
and she in turn drove into what seemed to be a mud bank. At about the
same instant the other barges struck bottom. Intense excitement and
confusion prevailed among the members of the expedition, since they were
almost out of sight of land and the draft of the motorboats was only
nineteen inches. But no efforts could move the barges from where they
were. All night long the propellers churned the gleaming water of the
lake to foam, but without result. Each and every barge and boat was hard
and fast aground, and when the gray daylight came stealing across the
lake there was no lake to be seen, only a reeking marsh, covered for
miles with a welter of green slime and decaying vegetable matter across
which it would seem no human being or animal could flounder. As far as
the eye could reach lay only a blackish ooze. And with the sun came
millions of mosquitoes and flies, and drove the men and mules frantic
with their stings.

Only one man, Ludwig Helmer, a gun driver from Potsdam, survived. Half
mad with the flies and nearly naked, he found his way somehow across the
quaking bog, after all his comrades had died of thirst, and reached a
tribe of Nascopees, who took hi