The poor negro musician’s tenacity of purpose arose from sheer love of his art. There was another laugh raised, however, about the same time, at the expense of the captain’s clerk, who, stimulated purely by a sense of duty, lost all recollection of himself, in his anxiety to save what was intrusted to his care, and thus was very nearly being drowned. This zealous person had general instructions, that whenever guns were fired, or any other circumstance occurred likely to shake the chronometer, he was to hold it in his hand, to prevent the concussion deranging its works. As soon, therefore, as the ship was dashed against the rocks, the clerk’s thoughts naturally turned exclusively on the time-piece. He caught the watch up, and ran on deck; but as he was no swimmer, he was obliged to cling to the mizen-mast, where he stuck fast, careless of every thing but his important charge. When the ship fell over, and the mast became nearly horizontal, he managed to creep along till he reached the mizen-top, where he seated himself in some trepidation—grinning like a monkey that has run off with a cocoa-nut—till the spar gave way, and he was plunged, chronometer and all, right overboard. Every eye was turned to the spot, to see whether this most public-spirited of scribes was ever to appear again; when, to the great joy of all hands, he emerged from the waves—watch still in hand! and was with great difficulty dragged into one of the boats, half drowned. With the exception of this fortunate chronometer, and the Admiral’s despatches, which the captain had secured when the ship first struck, every thing on board was lost. The pinnace now contained seventy-nine men and one woman, the cutter forty-two, and the gig eighteen, with which cargoes they barely floated. Captain Hickey was, of course, the last man who left the wreck; though, such were the respect and affection felt for him by his crew, that those who stood along with him on this last vestige of the ship, evinced the greatest reluctance at leaving their commander in such a perilous predicament. So speedy, indeed, was the work of destruction, that by the time the captain was fairly in the boat, the wreck had almost entirely ‘melted into the yest of waves.’ The crew, however, gave her three hearty cheers as she went down, and then finally abandoned the scattered fragments of what had been their house and home for nearly seven years.