lled the sail that was
stretched overhead and bellied it down upon us, and that gave us less
room, so that some had to lie flat on their faces; but when this
bellying got too bad we'd all get up and make one heave with our backs
under the sail, and chuck the water out of it in that way. "Charlie
Fish," says Tom Cooper to me, in a grave voice, "what would some of
them young gen'lmen as comes to Ramsgate in the summer, and says they'd
like to go out in the lifeboat, think of this?" This made me laugh,
and then young Tom Cooper votes for another nipper of rum all round;
and as it was drawing on for one o'clock in the morning, and some of
the men were groaning with cold, and pressing themselves against the
thwarts with the pain of it, I made no objection, and the liquor went
round. I always take a cake of Fry's chocolate with me when I go out
in the lifeboat, as I find it very supporting, and I had a mind to have
a mouthful now; but when I opened the locker I found it full of water,
my chocolate nothing but paste, and the biscuit a mass of pulp. This
was rather hard, as there was nothing else to eat, and there was no
getting near the tug in that sea unless we wanted to be smashed into
staves. However, we hadn't come out to enjoy ourselves; nothing was
said, and so we lay in a heap, hugging one another for warmth, until
the morning broke.

'The first man to look to leeward was old Tom's son--young Tom
Cooper--and in a moment he bawled out, "There she is!" pointing like a
madman. The morning had only just broke, and the light was grey and
dim, and down in the west it still seemed to be night; the air was full
of spray, and scarcely were we a-top of a sea than we were rushing like
an arrow into the hollow again, so that young Tom must have had eyes
like a hawk to have seen her. Yet the moment he sung out and pointed,
all hands cried out, "There she is!" But what was it, sir? Only a
mast about three miles off--just one single mast sticking up out of the
white water, as thin and faint as a spider's line. Yet that was the
ship we had been waiting all night to see. There she was, and my heart
thumped in my ears the moment my eye fell on that mast. But Lord, sir,
the fearful sea that was raging between her and us! for where we were
was deepish water, and the waves regular; but all about the wreck was
the Sand, and the water on it was running in fury all sorts of ways,
rushing up in tall columns of foam as high as a ship