Robbery and rioting continued during the night, and as the town was in darkness, the effort of the authorities to control the lawless element was not entirely successful. Big bonfires were built at various places from heaps of rubbish to enable troops the better to see where watchfulness was needed. Reports said that more than 100 looters and vandals were slain in the city and along the island beach. The most rigid enforcement of martial law was not able to suppress robbery entirely. Thirty-three negroes, with effects taken from dead bodies, were tried by court-martial. They were convicted and ordered to be shot. One negro had twenty-three human fingers with rings on them in his pocket. An eye-witness of the awful horror said: "I was going to take the train at midnight, and was at the station when the worst of the storm came up. There were 150 people in the depot, and we all remained there for nine hours. The back part of the building blew in Sunday morning and I returned to the Tremont house. The streets were literally filled with dead and dying people. The Sisters' Orphan Hospital was a terrible scene. I saw there over ninety dead children and eleven dead Sisters. We took the steamer Allen Charlotte across the bay, up Buffalo bay, over to Houston in the morning, and I saw fully fifty dead bodies floating in the water. I saw one dray with sixty-four dead bodies being drawn by four horses to the wharves, where the bodies were unloaded on a tug and taken out in the gulf for burial." Mr. Wortham, ex-secretary of state, after an inspection of the scene, made this statement: "The situation at Galveston beggars description. Fully seventy-five per cent. of the business portion of the town is wrecked, and the same percentage of damage is to be found in the residence district. Along the wharf front great ocean steamers have bodily dumped themselves on the big piers, and lie there, great masses of iron and wood that even fire cannot totally destroy. The great warehouses along the water front are smashed in on one side, unroofed and gutted throughout their length; their contents either piled in heaps or along the streets. Small tugs and sailboats have jammed themselves into buildings, where they were landed by the incoming waves and left by the receding waters. "Houses are packed and jammed in great confusing masses in all the streets. Great piles of human bodies, dead animals, rotting vegetation, household furniture, and fragments of the houses themselves, are piled in confused heaps right in the main streets of the city. Along the Gulf front human bodies are floating around like cordwood."