their children, and perished in
their endeavours to save them. One young lady, who had resolutely
refused to quit her father, whose sense of duty kept him at his post,
was near falling a sacrifice to her filial devotion, not having been
picked up by those in the boats until she had sunk five or six times. A
man, who was reduced to the frightful alternative of losing his wife or
his children, hastily decided in favour of his duty to the former. His
wife was accordingly saved, but his four children, alas! were left to
perish. A fine fellow, a soldier, who had neither wife nor child of his
own, but who evinced the greatest solicitude for the safety of those of
others, insisted on having three children lashed to him, with whom he
plunged into the water; not being able to reach the boat, he was again
drawn into the ship with his charge, but not before two of the children
had expired. One man fell down the hatchway into the flames, and another
had his back so completely broken as to have been observed quite doubled
falling overboard. These spectacles of individual loss and suffering
were not confined to the entrance upon the perilous voyage between the
two ships. One man, who fell between the boat and brig, had his head
literally crushed to pieces; and some others were lost in their attempts
to ascend the side of the _Cambria_.

Seeing that the tardy means employed for the escape of the women and
children necessarily consumed a great deal of time that might be partly
devoted to the general preservation, orders were given that along with
the females, each of the boats should also admit a certain portion of
the soldiers, several of whom, in their impatience to take advantage of
this permission, flung themselves overboard, and sank in their
ill-judged and premature efforts for deliverance.

One poor fellow of this number, a very respectable man, had actually
reached the boat, and was raising his hand to lay hold on the gunwale,
when the bow of the boat, by a sudden pitch, struck him on the head,
and he instantly went down. There was a peculiarity attending this man's
case that deserves notice. His wife, to whom he was warmly attached, not
having been of the allotted number of women to accompany the regiment
abroad, resolved in her anxiety to follow her husband, to defeat this
arrangement, and accordingly repaired with the detachment to Gravesend,
where she ingeniously managed, by eluding the vigilance of the sentries,
to get o