I.His wicked and reckless career[1]
II.His conversion and inner experience[6]
III.His Christian labours[14]
IV.His staunch teetotalism[22]
V.His bold adventures on the water[31]
VI.His method of rescuing the drowning[44]
VII.His gallant and humane conduct in rescuing the drowning[51]
VIII.The honoured hero[95]
IX.His general character, death, etc. [116]
X.The hero's funeral[122]

The Hero of the Humber.

CHAPTER I.

HIS WICKED AND RECKLESS CAREER AS A SAILOR.

The fine old town of Hull has many institutions of which it is deservedly proud. There is the Charter house, a monument of practical piety of the days of old. There is the Literary and Philosophical Institute, with its large and valuable library, and its fine museum, each of which is most handsomely housed. There is the new Town Hall, the work of one of the town's most gifted sons. There is the tall column erected in honour of Wilberforce, in the days when the representatives of the law were expected to obey the laws, and when the cultivation of a philanthropic feeling towards the negro had not gone out of fashion. There is the Trinity House, with its magnificent endowments, which have for more than five centuries blessed the mariners of the port, and which is now represented by alms-houses, so numerous, so large, so externally beautiful, and so trimly kept as to be both morally and architecturally among the noblest ornaments of the town. There is the Port of Hull Society, with its chapel, its reading-rooms, its orphanage, its seaman's mission, all most generously supported. There is that leaven of ancient pride which also may be classed among the institutions of the place, and which operates in giving to a population by no means wealthy a habit of respectability, and a look for the most part well-to-do. But among none of these will be found the institution to which we are about to refer. The institution that we are to-day concerned to honour is compact, is self-supporting, is eminently philanthropic, has done more good with very limited means than any other, and is so much an object of legitimate pride, that we have pleasure in making this unique institution more generally known. A life-saving institution that has in the course of a few brief years rescued about fifty people from drowning, and that has done so without expectation of reward, deserves to be named, and the name of this institution is simply that of a comparatively poor man—John Ellerthorpe, dock gatekeeper, at the entrance of the Humber Dock.'

Such was the strain in which the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, in a Leader (March 17th, 1868), spoke of the character and doings of him whom a grateful and admiring town entitled 'The Hero of the Humber.'

HIS NATIVITY.