As the Matutina breaks apart under the violent assault of the storm, the scholar on board, Doctor Gernardus Geestemunde, prepares a final document. He signs his name onto a parchment and commands the remaining fugitives to follow suit. Among those who sign or leave their mark are the Basque and Irish women, the gang leader Gaïzdorra, and several outcasts from various regions, followed by the two surviving Basque sailors. After compiling these final testimonies, the doctor takes a leather flask from one of the men, inserts the tightly rolled parchment inside, and seals the neck with rope and boiling tar to make it entirely watertight. With their criminal pasts and impending doom weighing heavily upon them, the group unites in a final, multilingual prayer as the vessel slips beneath the surface. The crew and passengers drown while kneeling, leaving only the doctor to hold the sealed flask high above the water in his final moments before he too is consumed by the sea. The buoyant, tarred flask is left alone to float away into the dark, snow-covered expanse.
Meanwhile, the same ferocious blizzard rages across the land, enveloping the abandoned young boy as he struggles through the trackless wasteland of the Portland plateau. Navigating the treacherous, narrow spine of the Chess-Hill isthmus, the boy walks blindly between two deadly abysses, with the raging open sea on one side and a deep gulf on the other. He repeatedly evades deep fissures, deceptive quicksands, and freezing water holes, relying strictly on his survival instincts to cross the harsh terrain. After nearly an hour of exhausting perseverance, he successfully reaches the safety of the mainland, where he discovers a fresh set of footprints belonging to a woman. He follows the tracks through the heavy drifts until they are completely erased by the dense, falling snow, leaving him disoriented once more in the silent, white wilderness.
Suddenly, a faint, rhythmic groan breaks the silence of the plain, sounding like the desperate cry of a dying creature. Guided by the fragile voice, the boy discovers a small mound in the snow that resembles a fresh grave. He kneels and frantically clears the snow with his bare hands, uncovering the frozen, lifeless face of a young woman who has succumbed to the bitter cold. Searching further beneath her rags, his hands detect a slight movement on the woman's chest. He uncovers a tiny, shivering infant girl who is still alive but deeply frozen. The infant had been trying to nurse from her mother, whose breast still bears a single frozen drop of milk. As soon as the young boy lifts the freezing baby into his protective embrace, her cries cease, binding the two abandoned children together in the heart of the storm.