e splendid cables supplied by the Royal
National Lifeboat Institution will understand the great force that must
have been exerted to snap this mighty hawser. But so it happened, and
away to leeward into the darkness, smothered, baffled, and almost
drowned, but by no means beaten, were swept on to and into the
shallower and more furious surf of the north-west jaw of the Goodwins,
the Ramsgate lifeboatmen.

Contrast the freezing midnight scene of storm and surf, eight miles
from the nearest land, with the quiet sleep of millions.

Here was a January midnight, black as a wolf's throat--thermometer 15 deg.
below freezing, a mountainous surf on the Goodwins, and only twelve
brave men to face it all; but those twelve men were the heroes of a
hundred fights, and were determined to save the men on the wreck or die
for it.

Therefore, though swept to leeward, they got sail on the lifeboat and
got her on the starboard tack, ten men sheeting home the fore sheet.
'Bad job this!' they said, for words were few that night, and they made
through the surf for the tug, which was on the look-out for them, and
steered for the blue light they burned. Nothing can be more ghastly
than the effect of this blue light on the faces of the men or on the
wild hurly-burly of boiling snow white foam one moment seen raging
round the lifeboat, and the next obliterated in darkness, the more
pitchy by reason of the extinguished flare.

The blue light was seen by the Aid, and she moved to leeward to pick up
the lifeboat after she emerged from the breakers. Again the tug-boat
passed her hawser on board the lifeboat, and once more towed her to
windward to the same position as before; and once again, burning to
save the despairing sailors, the lifeboatmen dropped anchor and veered
out their last remaining cable, well-knowing this was the last chance,
as they had only the one remaining cable. Tight as a fiddle string was
the good hawser, and the howling north-easter hummed its weird tune
along its vibrating length, as coil after coil was paid out in the
lulls, and the lifeboat came closer and closer, and at last slued right
under the starboard quarter of the wreck.

By hand-lights, blue and green, they saw, high up in the air, the
unfortunate crew lashed in the weather-rigging, i. e. on the port or
left side of the wreck, the side opposite to that under shelter of
which they lay. The shelter was a poor one, for great seas broke over
the wreck and in