Barents himself was now too ill to walk, so they carried him to one of the little boats, and on 14th June 1597 the little party put off from their winter quarters and sailed round to Ice Point. But the pilot was dying. "Are we about Ice Point?" he asked feebly. "If we be, then I pray you lift me up, for I must view it once again."
Then suddenly the wind began to rise, driving the ice so fast upon them "that it made our hair stand upright upon our heads, it was so fearful to behold, so that we thought verily that it was a foreshadowing of our last end."
They drew the boats up on to the ice and lifted the sick commander out and laid him on the icy ground, where a few days later he died—"our chief guide and only pilot on whom we reposed ourselves next under God." The rest of the story is soon told.
On 1st November 1597 some twelve gaunt and haggard men, still wearing caps of white fox and coats of bearskin, having guided their little open boats all the way from Nova Zembla, arrived at Amsterdam and told the story of their exploration to the astonished merchants, who had long since given them up as dead.
It was not till 1871 that Barents' old winter quarters on Nova Zembla were discovered. "There stood the cooking-pans over the fireplace, the old clocks against the wall, the arms, the tools, the drinking vessels, the instruments and the books that had beguiled the weary hours of that long night, two hundred and seventy-eight years ago." Among the relics were a pair of small shoes and a flute which had belonged to a little cabin-boy who had died during the winter.