saved from the surrounding destruction. The people on the beach
crowded to the spot where they would probably be driven, that they
might render every possible assistance; but what was their horror to
see a tremendous wave strike the poop, capsize it, and turn it over
and over; whilst every one of those who clung to it perished!

But the terrors of that awful night were not yet exhausted. The wreck,
to which the remaining officers and men were clinging, heeled towards
the shore; but when the gale increased and blew with redoubled force,
it heeled off again, rent fore and aft, and parted in two
places--before the main-chains, and abaft the fore-chains--and then
all disappeared from the eyes of the awe-stricken spectators on the
beach.

High above the crash of timbers and the roaring of the blast, rose the
despairing cry of hundreds of human beings who perished in the waters,
and whose mutilated forms, with the fragments of the wreck, strewed
the beach for miles on the following morning.

Thirty or forty seamen and marines still clung to the bow, the sea
breaking over them incessantly; they kept their hold, however, in the
fond hope that the signal gun remaining, might by its weight prevent
the bow from being capsized; but the timbers, unable to resist the
fury of the tempest, suddenly parted,--the gun reeled from side to
side, and the unhappy men shared the fate of their companions. It has
been said that during that awful time, whilst threatened with instant
death, many of these men were in a stupor, with their hands locked in
the chain plates.

Among the incidents connected with the wreck, it is related that Mr.