m, and at the same time by its great weight and impulse,
beat the stern of the steamship a little way round to the west.

Hauling on this cable without letting go their own anchor, Jarvist
Arnold and his small crew hauled their lifeboat as close under the
leaning bridge as they dared.

The first man who tried to escape from the bridge in his leap missed
the lifeboat and fell into the sea, and not a moment too soon was
grasped by friendly hands and dragged into the lifeboat.

The direction of the tidal current on the Goodwins shifts every hour to
a different point of the compass; and now this strong eddy, being
altered still more by the position of the wreck, would suck the
lifeboat towards the stern of the wreck. There she would meet another
current of the truer tide, and get hurried back again half buried in
breakers, which were ever and anon bursting over and round the stern of
the wreck.

[Illustration: The Sorrento on the Goodwin Sands.]

Then she would come back under the bridge, where every effort was made
to hold her by stern ropes; and as she rose, 'by the dreadful tempest
borne, high on the broken wave,' man after man they jumped, or were
dragged, or came quick as lightning down a rope, into the Sabrina, the
whole forty-six of the imperilled men, the captain being last man, and
almost too late.

Bringing with them the old cork fender as a memento, Jarvist and his
unbeaten crew sheered out their lifeboat to ride by their own cable, as
before the timely arrival of the fender. Now they saw signs of the
approaching break up of the Sorrento, for before they had left her very
long her funnel and masts went overboard, and reeling to the blows of
the sea, she split in halves and disappeared under the breakers of the
Goodwins.

But before this dramatic conclusion, the Kingsdown lifeboat slipped her
anchor, to which she never could have got back, and setting her mast
and double-reefed storm-foresail, ran away before the wind through the
'heavy boiling surf' on the Goodwins. These are the coxswain's own
written words, and I can only repeat they are below the grim reality.

With the forty-six rescued seafarers on board she was terribly low in
the water, and was filled in and out from both sides at once by the
seas as they broke. Only a lifeboat could have lived, but even she
resembled a floating baulk of timber, which is covered and swept by the
seas on the same level as itself. Holding on for life to thwarts