remained motionless at
some distance.

My recollection is that the _Douro_ remained afloat after the collision
for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. It might have been twenty, but
certainly something under the half-hour. In that time the boats were
lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off. There
was no time to do anything more. All the crew of the _Douro_ went down
with her, literally without a murmur. When she went she plunged bodily
down like a stone. The only members of the ship's company who survived
were the third officer, who was from the first ordered to take charge of
the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each. Nobody else
was picked up. A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty,
with whom I talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up
to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest cry.

But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. She was a lady's maid
who, frenzied with terror, refused to leave the ship. One of the boats
waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable
to tear the girl away from the rail to which she dung with a frantic
grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. My quartermaster told me
that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice, and this was the last
sound heard before the ship sank.

The rest is silence. I daresay there was the usual official inquiry, but
who cared for it? That sort of thing speaks for itself with no uncertain
voice; though the papers, I remember, gave the event no space to speak
of: no large headlines--no headlines at all. You see it was not the
fashion at the time. A seaman-like piece of work, of which one cherishes
the old memory at this juncture more than ever before. She was a ship
commanded, manned, equipped--not a sort of marine Ritz, proclaimed
unsinkable and sent adrift with its casual population upon the sea,
without enough boats, without enough seamen (but with a Parisian cafe and
four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the
engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves; sent with a
blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most
fatuous disaster.

And there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. The rush
of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws
of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative abuse of a man no more