the quarter, the _Adler_ had lost her bowsprit; the _Nipsic_ had lost
her smoke-stack, and was making steam with difficulty, maintaining her
fire with barrels of pork, and the smoke and sparks pouring along the
level of the deck. For the seventh war-ship the day had come too late;
the _Eber_ had finished her last cruise; she was to be seen no more save
by the eyes of divers. A coral reef is not only an instrument of
destruction, but a place of sepulture; the submarine cliff is profoundly
undercut, and presents the mouth of a huge antre in which the bodies of
men and the hulls of ships are alike hurled down and buried. The _Eber_
had dragged anchors with the rest; her injured screw disabled her from
steaming vigorously up; and a little before day she had struck the front
of the coral, come off, struck again, and gone down stern foremost,
oversetting as she went, into the gaping hollow of the reef. Of her
whole complement of nearly eighty, four souls were cast alive on the
beach; and the bodies of the remainder were, by the voluminous
outpouring of the flooded streams, scoured at last from the harbour, and
strewed naked on the seaboard of the island.

Five ships were immediately menaced with the same destruction. The
_Eber_ vanished--the four poor survivors on shore--read a dreadful
commentary on their danger; which was swelled out of all proportion by
the violence of their own movements as they leaped and fell among the
billows. By seven the _Nipsic_ was so fortunate as to avoid the reef and
beach upon a space of sand; where she was immediately deserted by her
crew, with the assistance of Samoans, not without loss of life. By
about eight it was the turn of the _Adler_. She was close down upon the
reef; doomed herself, it might yet be possible to save a portion of her
crew; and for this end Captain Fritze placed his reliance on the very
hugeness of the seas that threatened him. The moment was watched for
with the anxiety of despair, but the coolness of disciplined courage. As
she rose on the fatal wave, her moorings were simultaneously slipped;
she broached to in rising; and the sea heaved her bodily upward and cast
her down with a concussion on the summit of the reef, where she lay on
her beam-ends, her back broken, buried in breaching seas, but safe.
Conceive a table: the _Eber_ in the darkness had been smashed against
the rim and flung below; the _Adler_, cast free in the nick of
opportunity, had been thrown upon the