consistent; but if I am to pay any attention to the time
named by Admiral Kimberley, the _Calliope_, in this first stage of her
escape, must have taken more than two hours to cover less than four
cables. As she thus crept seaward, she buried bow and stern alternately
under the billows.

In the fairway of the entrance the flagship _Trenton_ still held on. Her
rudder was broken, her wheel carried away; within she was flooded with
water from the peccant hawse-pipes; she had just made the signal "fires
extinguished," and lay helpless, awaiting the inevitable end. Between
this melancholy hulk and the external reef Kane must find a path.
Steering within fifty yards of the reef (for which she was actually
headed) and her foreyard passing on the other hand over the _Trenton's_
quarter as she rolled, the _Calliope_ sheered between the rival dangers,
came to the wind triumphantly, and was once more pointed for the sea and
safety. Not often in naval history was there a moment of more sickening
peril, and it was dignified by one of those incidents that reconcile the
chronicler with his otherwise abhorrent task. From the doomed flagship
the Americans hailed the success of the English with a cheer. It was led
by the old admiral in person, rang out over the storm with holiday
vigour, and was answered by the Calliopes with an emotion easily
conceived. This ship of their kinsfolk was almost the last external
object seen from the _Calliope_ for hours; immediately after, the mists
closed about her till the morrow. She was safe at sea again--_una de
multis_--with a damaged foreyard, and a loss of all the ornamental work
about her bow and stern, three anchors, one kedge-anchor, fourteen
lengths of chain, four boats, the jib-boom, bobstay, and bands and
fastenings of the bowsprit.

Shortly after Kane had slipped his cable, Captain Schoonmaker,
despairing of the _Vandalia_, succeeded in passing astern of the _Olga_,
in the hope to beach his ship beside the _Nipsic_. At a quarter to
eleven her stern took the reef, her hand swung to starboard, and she
began to fill and settle. Many lives of brave men were sacrificed in the
attempt to get a line ashore; the captain, exhausted by his exertions,
was swept from deck by a sea; and the rail being soon awash, the
survivors took refuge in the tops.

Out of thirteen that had lain there the day before, there were now but
two ships afloat in Apia harbour, and one of these was doomed to be the
bane of