h Seas alone occur in fearful succession;
and the magnanimity with which hundreds, nay, thousands of our bravest
officers and men met death on that most perilous of all services, has
rendered the names of British blockading ships memorable in the annals
of hardship, hardihood, and suffering. Many invaluable lives perished
from the inclemency of the weather; men were frozen to death at their
posts. It is recorded of one devoted officer, Lieutenant Topping, that
rushing on deck in anxiety for his ship, without giving himself time
to put on his clothes, 'in fifteen minutes he fell upon the deck a
corpse, stricken by the piercing blast and driving snow,' (p. 169.)

In page 174, we read of the bodies of the dead, victims to the cold
and tempest, piled up by the survivors in rows one above another, on
the deck of the St. George, to serve as a shelter against the violence
of the waves and weather. 'In the fourth row lay the bodies of the
Admiral and his friend Captain Guion;' and out of a crew of 750, seven
only were saved.

The Defence, the consort of the St. George, was cast away in the same
storm: out of her complement of 600, six was the small remnant of
survivors. This ship might probably have escaped, but her gallant
captain (Atkins) said, 'I will never desert my admiral in the hour of
danger and distress,' (p. 175.)

An instance of obedience and discipline, worthy of particular mention,
occurred before the St. George went down. A few men asked leave to
attempt to reach the shore in the yawl. Permission was at first
granted, but afterwards withdrawn, and the men returned to their posts
without a murmur. 'As if Providence had rewarded their implicit
obedience and reliance upon their officers,' says the narrative (p.
173), 'two of these men were of the few (seven) that were saved.'

The question now arises, to what are we to attribute the extraordinary
display of cool determination manifested by British seamen, in such
trials of nerve as are described in the following pages? The series of
shipwrecks extends from 1793 to 1847, a period of fifty-four years;
and tragic scenes are described, many of them far exceeding the
imaginary terrors of fiction, and all of them equal in horror to
anything that the Drama, Romance, or Poetry has attempted to
delineate.

We rise from the perusal with scarcely any other impression upon our
minds than that of wonder and admiration, at the extraordinary
self-command exercised when death