Days before Scott and Bowers had made Dr. Wilson give them that which would enable them to put an end to their misery; but now to-night, when face to face with death, they resolved that they would die natural deaths; it should not be said of them that they shirked. Each morning until the 29th they got ready to start for the depot that was so near, with its food, its fuel, its warmth, its companions; and each day they found the blizzard howling about them, as effectual a barrier as if it had been a cast-iron wall.
“We shall stick it out to the end,” wrote Scott on the 29th, “but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
“It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
“For God’s sake look after our people!”
And so they died, these heroes and gentlemen; and through Scott’s last letters which were found with the dead bodies in the tent on November 10 there is but one thought running: the care of the people left behind and the praises of the men who had accompanied him. Never were such eulogiums written. “Gallant, noble gentlemen,” he called them, as death brooded over him; and throughout every line there was the spirit of cheeriness which takes life—and death—as becomes a hero who knows that failure was no fault of his own, that man can do no more than fight nobly against the forces arrayed against him.
STORIES OF THE LIFEBOAT
Noble Deeds of Brave Men
THE bluff and hearty men, heroes every one, who live all around the coasts, ready to launch their lifeboats to go to the aid of shipwrecked mariners, have a bright page in the history of the sea. They are the saviours of those who go down to the sea in ships, and on every errand of mercy they literally take their lives in their hands, place themselves on the knees of the gods ready for sacrifice.
Sometimes the gods accept the sacrifice.
It happened so in the case of the Fethard lifeboat which, on February 20, 1914, pushed off to the assistance of the Norwegian schooner Mexico, wrecked on the rocky island of South Keeragh. The Mexico, losing her bearings when off the south coast of Ireland, was driven into Bannow Bay, missed stays when her crew tried to put her about, was caught by the fierce S.S.W. gale and the strong tide, and driven close to the South Keeragh Island.