him with great
force against the samson-post, breaking over and covering the lifeboat
fore and aft in fury. This sea would have washed every man off the
wreck if they had not had ropes round their waists, and fastened
themselves to something; and it most certainly stupefied them and
half-drowned them, fastened as they were.

The blow which Wilds in the lifeboat received would have killed him but
that he was wearing his thick cork life-belt. His health was so much
affected that he never came afloat again, and he never recovered the
strain, the shock, and the exposure of this day. He was a brave man,
and a stout, honest Englishman.

Faithful below he did his duty,
And now he's gone aloft.

And the writer has good reason for sure and certain hope that this is
so. His post as coxswain has since been filled, and nobly filled, by
R. Roberts, for many years second coxswain.

In meeting this sea, which struck down poor Wilds with such force, the
lifeboat stood straight up on her stern and reared, as the men
expressed it, 'like a vicious horse'; and so much did the cable spring,
that the lifeboat was driven to within a fathom, or six feet, of the
wreck, and was withdrawn the next instant to fifteen fathoms distance
by the recoil of the cable.

One by one the men were dragged through the breakers into the lifeboat,
until at last only two remained on the wreck, George Marsh and another
man. It was Marsh, it will be remembered, who in the earlier part of
the day had been persuaded to return to the wreck across the sand, and
it was Marsh now who in each case had passed the clove-hitch round his
comrades, sending them before himself. He was a very smart sailor and
a brave man, and with wise forethought he had also passed the end of
the veering line, on which the men were dragged through the surf, over
the main boom of the wreck, to let it run out clear of anything which
might have caught it, and, in fact, was the leader of the men in peril
on the wreck.

The last two men intended to come together, when another great billow,
notice of its advance being given by Tom Adams, came towering and
seething, filled the lifeboat, as usual, and covered the ship--indeed,
breaking right into her fore-top-sail! That is, thirty feet above her
deck!

When the sea passed, the two remaining men, who had been tied together,
were not to be seen.

The men in the lifeboat pulled at the line, but it was somehow and
somewhere fast t