uted 'She's
capsized!' The Ramsgate lifeboat was indeed almost, but not quite
capsized, and she was also shot forwards and caught under the cat-head
and anchor of the wreck. The captain of the wrecked vessel told me
afterwards that he thought she was lost, but it was happily not so, and
the Ramsgate lifeboatmen anchored, after recovering themselves, ahead
of the vessel and veered down to her.

But the tidal current which runs over the Goodwins varies in a very
irregular manner according to the wind that is blowing, and, contrary
to their calculations, swept the Ramsgate lifeboat to the full length
of her cable away from the vessel.

They naturally expected to find the usual off-tide from the land before
and at high-water, which would have carried them towards the vessel
when they anchored under her lee; but instead of that there was running
a strong 'in-tide,' which swept them helplessly away from the vessel,
and rendered them absolutely unable to reach her, though anchored only
two hundred yards off.

The seamen on the wreck, in order to reach by some means the lifeboat
which had thus been borne away from them so mysteriously, threw a
fender, with line attached, overboard, hoping that it too would follow
the current which carried away the lifeboat, and that thus
communications would be established between them; but the currents
round the ship held the fender close to the wreck, and kept it eddying
under her lee.

All eyes were now turned to the advancing Deal lifeboat battling in the
thickest of the surf. Both the Ramsgate men with warm sympathy and the
shipwrecked crew with keen anxiety watched the Deal men's attempt, as
they raced into the wild breakers.

The poor fellows clinging to the masts feared lest the Deal lifeboat
too might miss them, and that they might all be lost before either
lifeboat could reach them again, and they beckoned the Deal men on.

The very crisis of their fate was at hand, but there were no applauding
multitudes or shouts of encouragement, only the cold wastes and
solitudes of wild tumbling breakers around the lifeboatmen on that grey
dawn, and only the appealing helpless crew in a little cluster on the
wreck.

It was now 4 a.m., and the Deal coxswain, cool and sturdy as his native
Kentish oak, knowing that the combination of an easterly gale with neap
tides sometimes produces an 'in-tide' at high-water, and seeing the
Ramsgate lifeboat carried to leeward, gave the order to 'down