For want of action, the stomach so far loses its digestive powers that, after long fasting, it resumes its office with pain and reluctance." After these prolonged fasts, his stomach was scarcely able to contain two or three ounces of food without producing the most agonizing pain.

"We fasted many times two whole days and nights, and twice for three days; once for nearly seven days, during which we tasted not a mouthful of anything, except a few cranberries, water, scraps of old leather, and burnt bones." At a place 63 deg.

north latitude he bought a canoe for a single knife "the full value of which did not exceed one penny", having been told that they would soon reach rivers through which they could not wade.
And, moreover, they found an Indian who was willing to carry it.

In July his guide persuaded him to join an encampment of natives--about six hundred persons living in seventy tents--asserting that, as it was no use proceeding much farther north in their search for the Coppermine River that season, it would be well to winter to the west, and resume their northern journey in the spring.

The country, though quite devoid of trees, and mostly barren rock, was covered with a herb or shrub called by the Indian name of Wishakapakka,[2] from which the European servants of the Hudson's Bay Company had long been used to prepare a kind of tea by steeping it in boiling water.