It may have been, for one thing, that they were at least partly mistaken as to what was killing them. Their growing malnutrition was rapidly breaking down both their psychological defenses against madness and their physiological defenses against the cold, all of which must have contributed to an overwhelming sense of impending doom. To some extent they believed that Stanton, Antonio, Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Lemuel Murphy had died of hunger, when in fact they almost certainly had died primarily of hypothermia. As a consequence the survivors might well have thought that they
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