lear that the situation of those on board her was
frightfully critical, and that if they were to be saved no time must be
wasted. The craft was a wooden, English-built barque of between five
hundred and six hundred tons register, with a full poop; and seemed,
from the little we could see of her, to be a very fine, handsome vessel.
Her three masts, as well as her jib-boom, were gone; and from the stump
of her mizzenmast the red ensign was flying, union down; while the wreck
of the spars and all the raffle of sails and rigging was floating along
her starboard or lee side in a wild swirl of foam. Her bulwarks were
swept clean away on both sides, from the catheads as far aft as the
poop, only the stump of a staunchion remaining here and there to show
where they had been. She had, like ourselves, a short topgallant
forecastle, under which the windlass was housed, and this structure
remained intact; but a deck-house abaft the foremast, and between it and
the main hatch, had been swept entirely away, with the exception of the
sills, which still remained bolted to the deck. The long-boat, also,
which is almost invariably stowed on top of the main hatch, was gone,
not even the chocks remaining to show where she had been. In short, the
whole of the deck, forward of the poop, had been cleared of everything
removable, the only things remaining above the level of the deck being
the gallows, the stumps of the main and fore masts, the fife-rails, and
the pumps. The front of the poop was stove in, and the poop ladders
were gone; there were no boats on the gallows; and while the boat
hanging in the lee davits had had her bottom torn out, of that which had
hung at the weather davits only the stem and stern-posts remained. She
was floating broadside-on to the sea, and was very deep in the water, so
deep, indeed, that every wave swept completely over her maindeck in a
perfect smother of foam; and she rolled so horribly that I momentarily
expected to see her turn bottom up. Moreover, that there was a very
considerable quantity of water in her hold was made painfully manifest
by the sickening sluggishness of her movements in response to the heave
of the sea; there seemed to be scarcely a particle of life left in her,
many of the seas running completely over the forepart of her before she
could lift herself to them. And, to make matters still worse, she
appeared to have a heavy list to starboard, as though her cargo,
whatever it might