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There he gathered it together, and on Christmas night, 1776, while the enemy were feasting and celebrating in their quarters at Trenton, he ferried his army back across the ice-blocked river, fell upon the British, administered a stinging defeat, and never paused until he had driven them from New Jersey.
The night passed on and grew colder, and the wind came across the ice-blocked river with shriller, sharper blasts, but Guido did not hear it. "Chuckey" Martin, who blacked boots in front of the corner saloon in summer and swept out the bar-room in winter, came out through the family entrance and dumped a pan of hot ashes into the snow-bank, and then turned into the house with a shiver.
Petersburg. He crossed the ice-blocked Baltic in a small boat, compelled, at the muzzle of his pistols, the unwilling boatmen to proceed, and on his arrival at his destination, on April 23, was presented to the empress, who conferred upon him the coveted rank of rear-admiral, to the intense irritation of many of the English officers in the service of Russia, who looked upon Jones as a red-handed pirate.
Certainly, if it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores to find the Western Sea, it would as one of the French governors reported "be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France to discover this "sea of the setting sun."
If the Nation only knew the value of the prize, England would never be permitted to carry it off. His wife and friends protested against the desperate venture four thousand miles on horseback for it would soon be the dead of winter, with snow hiding the trail and filling the passes, with streams ice-blocked and winter-swollen, and last but not least, with the Blackfoot Indians on the warpath.
Although Nunaga, Kabelaw, and the children were now happily re-united to friends and kindred, their dangers were by no means over, for a wide space of ice-blocked sea separated the small island from the shores of Greenland, and their supply of meat was not sufficient, even with economy, to maintain the whole party for more than a couple of days.
With each succeeding decade it became clear that the hopes aroused by the New World lay not in finding a passage by the ice-blocked sounds of the north, but in occupying the vast continent of America itself. Many voyages were indeed attempted before the hope of a northern passage to the Indies was laid aside. Weymouth, Knight, and others followed in the track of Frobisher and Davis.
A swarm of mewing gulls went to and fro, and with them mingled pigeons and crows. The buildings on the Surrey side were dim and grey and very mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm.
All that Franklin saw of the Arctic coast encouraged his belief that the American continent is separated by stretches of sea from the great masses of land that had been already discovered in the Arctic. The North-West Passage, ice-blocked and useless, was still a geographical fact. Eager in the pursuit of his investigations he went on eastward as long as he dared too long in fact.
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