Again the people on the bridge watched their chance. One man managed to wade along the now submerged deck to reach the lead line, and he hauled it with the stronger rope on board, making the latter securely fast. Again had this man to fly for life up the bridge from an advancing billow, which, leaping over the stern of the wreck, nearly overtook him, and at the same time by its great weight and impulse, beat the stern of the steamship a little way round to the west.
Hauling on this cable without letting go their own anchor, Jarvist Arnold and his small crew hauled their lifeboat as close under the leaning bridge as they dared.
The first man who tried to escape from the bridge in his leap missed the lifeboat and fell into the sea, and not a moment too soon was grasped by friendly hands and dragged into the lifeboat.
The direction of the tidal current on the Goodwins shifts every hour to a different point of the compass; and now this strong eddy, being altered still more by the position of the wreck, would suck the lifeboat towards the stern of the wreck. There she would meet another current of the truer tide, and get hurried back again half buried in breakers, which were ever and anon bursting over and round the stern of the wreck.
The Sorrento on the Goodwin Sands.
Then she would come back under the bridge, where every effort was made to hold her by stern ropes; and as she rose, 'by the dreadful tempest borne, high on the broken wave,' man after man they jumped, or were dragged, or came quick as lightning down a rope, into the Sabrina, the whole forty-six of the imperilled men, the captain being last man, and almost too late.
Bringing with them the old cork fender as a memento, Jarvist and his unbeaten crew sheered out their lifeboat to ride by their own cable, as before the timely arrival of the fender. Now they saw signs of the approaching break up of the Sorrento, for before they had left her very long her funnel and masts went overboard, and reeling to the blows of the sea, she split in halves and disappeared under the breakers of the Goodwins.
But before this dramatic conclusion, the Kingsdown lifeboat slipped her anchor, to which she never could have got back, and setting her mast and double-reefed storm-foresail, ran away before the wind through the 'heavy boiling surf' on the Goodwins. These are the coxswain's own written words, and I can only repeat they are below the grim reality.