The topsails were in ribbons, and as the wrecked sailors clambered aloft the great whips of torn canvas lashed and terrified and wounded them. By great effort they got across the black gulf between the two riggings—all but the captain.
There high in air—visible as the blue lights flared up from the lifeboat, struggling hard for life, hung the captain.
One leg straddled across the chasm—one hand clutched the weather-rigging he wanted to leave, and one hand reached out blindly—hopefully to catch the lee shrouds—'You'll do it, captain! Come on, captain! For God's sake, captain, come on!' And every face in the blue glare was riveted on the struggling man but,—oh! what anguish to the staring lifeboatmen eager to save him!—he fell, his life-belt being torn off in his fall, full forty feet on to the wave-washed mizzen boom.
'Out boat-hooks, brave hearts, and catch him.' But a great billow broke over the wreck and lifeboatmen, and never was he seen again.
This time death won.
Let us trust he was ready to meet his God. 'If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.'
Some jumping, and some dragged by the lines, the rest of the shipwrecked men got into the lifeboat, so dazed, so benumbed that they neither realised the loss of the captain nor their own miraculous preservation.
Just at this moment, under press of canvas, the foam flying from her blue bows, at full speed came the Deal lifeboat, too late to avert the disaster they had witnessed.
They had left Deal at 3.15, but not having the aid of steam, were half-frozen and much later on the scene of action than the Ramsgate tug and lifeboat, to whom the honour of this grand rescue belongs.
They reached Ramsgate Harbour at 7.30 a.m. and at 9 o'clock, without having gone ashore to breakfast, almost worn out, but borne up by dauntless spirit within, in response to a telegram from Broadstairs, the same steam-tug, lifeboat, coxswain and crew, again steamed out of Ramsgate Harbour. A collier, the Glide, had gone to the bottom after collision with another vessel, named the Glance—such strange coincidences there are in real life—and the crew of the Glide had taken to their own small ship's boat, while the crew of the Glance had been saved by the Broadstairs lifeboat.