The men landed on the rock early in February. At that time there was no open water within five or six miles of the lighthouse in any direction. The men were landed on the ice and made their way up to where Campbell was waiting for them. On February 27, Campbell and his visitors left the rock to go in pursuit of the seals they had noticed on the ice the day before. His wife saw them start across the ice and then returned to her household duties. They had not been gone more than four hours, when the wind, which had been growing colder and blowing steadily from the eastward, shifted to the southwest. The southwest wind is the agency that dashes the ice fields against the cliff and breaks them up. She thought that the men, being so much lower, might not have noticed the wind, and she hoisted the danger signal. They must have seen it, for she soon caught sight of them hurrying over the ice toward the rock.
They were within gunshot of the lighthouse, when the ice cracked with a sound like thunder, and a long, blue line appeared, running east and west, parallel with the lighthouse rock and with North Bird Rock, about five miles to the westward. The big crack was followed by a general splitting up of the ice floe. She saw the men standing just the other side of the open water. She saw her husband wave his hands at her and she waved back. Then the darkness came, like a great blanket dropped from the wintry skies, and men and ice were blotted from her vision. But even in her sore distress she did not forget the duty incumbent on the lighthouse keeper. She clambered up into the lantern and lighted the great oil lamp, saw that it was filled, and attended to the other duties she had seen her husband perform.
Morning, when it came, gave no glimpse of her husband and his companions, nor did the third or the fourth day bring them back to her. After that the days grew into weeks, and the worse than widowed woman found herself confined to lonely and racking imprisonment on the ice-locked rock. But not for a single night did she fail to fill and light the lamp that had been her hapless husband's charge. When the Government steamer touched at Great Bird Bock, on May 5, 1897, the captain looked long and earnestly at the lighthouse perched far above him, and wondered why there was not the customary greeting. He saw no sign of life. There was the derrick rope swinging in the wind, but no moving figures at the top of the cliff, as there were wont to be.
Closely scanning the rock, he saw at last a white, gaunt face at the window. In a little while a thin, tottering figure crept to the brow of the ledge, but it was some minutes before the tender's captain could recognize in that wasted being the comely woman whom he had known as Angus Campbell's wife.
"Where is your husband?" he shouted.
"Angus is dead," came the answer, in a faint, palsied voice, "and so are Jim Duncan and George Bryson."
An instant later the captain had swung himself into the derrick ropes and was making his way up the rocks. When he reached the woman she burst into tears and fell at his feet. Calmed at last, she told her story.
"How did you stand it?" asked the captain when she had finished.
"God knows," was the reply. "I knew I had to keep that light burning, and that I think kept me alive. That was all I had to do, except watch the sea through my husband's glass. I got up night after night, and I do not think I ever slept two hours at a time. There were plenty of provisions, but I could not eat more than one meal a day, and sometimes I did not eat that. I had some hope on the morning after the boys were carried out on the ice floe, that they might be in sight and might be saved some way. But that morning there was nothing to be seen but water and ice. Then hope was gone. I knew there was nothing to do but wait for the spring. And I have done it. Every day I have swept the horizon with the aid of the glasses. It was merely a formality, after a while, but I kept on doing it. I do not know why. At last life got to be like being buried alive. I had no interest in living. I had no appetite, no thought of sleep. In all the time I do not suppose I have slept two hours in succession, nor at any time eaten more than one scanty meal a day. I was going crazy, and should have killed myself or died of starvation in another week."
A few days later Mrs. Campbell was removed from the rock to her former home in Prince Edward Island.