say it without fear, that from the hour of leaving
Ramsgate Harbour to the moment when we sighted the wreck's mast, there
was only one thought in all of us, and that was that the Almighty would
give us the strength and direct us how to save the lives of the poor
fellows to whose assistance we had been sent.'

Ten years more fly by, in which there is a splendid record of services
and rescues to the credit of Coxswain Fish, the Ramsgate lifeboatmen,
and the brave steam-tugs, Vulcan and Aid, and we come to the night of
Jan. 5 and 6, 1891, which is exactly, my readers will see, ten years to
the day after the rescue of the survivors of the Indian Chief, a rescue
certainly unsurpassed for its dramatic intensity and its heroism even
by the Deal lifeboat.

At 3 a.m. on the night of Jan. 5, 1891, Coxswain Fish was asleep in his
hammock in the watch-house at the end of Ramsgate pier. There was a
gale blowing from the E.N.E., and in the long frost of that awful
winter there was no more terrible night than this. The thermometer
stood at 15 deg. below freezing-point; there was a great sea and strong
wind.

At 3 a.m. Fish was called by the watch on Ramsgate pier, and he saw a
flare on the Goodwins through the rifts in the snow squall. At 2.15
Richard Roberts, the coxswain of the Deal lifeboat, was also roused
from sleep and launched his lifeboat, manned by the gallant Deal men.
But though the Deal men launched at 3.15 a.m., they had not the same
favourable chance of reaching the wreck, beating eight miles dead to
windward, as compared with the Ramsgate lifeboat, towed into the eye of
the wind by its powerful steam-tug Aid.

We may on this occasion, therefore, leave out the consideration of the
Deal lifeboat, splendid as its effort was, inasmuch as it only arrived
at the scene of the wreck just as the Ramsgate lifeboat had saved the
crew. Some of the hardy Deal lifeboatmen were almost benumbed and
rendered helpless by the cold, and they only saw the tragedy of the
captain's death and the rescue of the remainder of the crew from the
wreck by the Ramsgate men.

At 3 a.m. then the Ramsgate rocket went up in answer to the signals
from the Gull lightship; on that bitter night the lifeboat was manned
in eight minutes. The lifebelts and oilskins were handed into the
lifeboat; shivering, the brave hearts got their clothes on, and in less
time than this page has been written, the tow rope had been passed into
the lifeboat from the