There was now only the small boat, capable of safely containing but eight persons, and how, it was whispered among us—how, in addition to the two seamen already in her, can she take off Lieutenant Arguellas, M. Dupont, the remaining colored man, the four seamen, and Captain Starkey? They were, however, all speedily embarked except the captain. “Can she bear another?” he asked, and although his voice was firm as ever, his countenance, I noticed, was ashy pale, yet full as ever of unswerving resolution. “We must, and will, sir, since it’s you; but we are dangerously overcrowded now, especially with yon ugly customers swimming round us.” “Stay one moment; I can not quit the ship while there’s a living soul on board.” He stepped hastily forward, and presently reappeared at the gangway with the still senseless body of the lieutenant’s servant in his arms, and dropped it over the side into the boat. There was a cry of indignation, but it was of no avail. The boat’s rope the next instant was cast into the water. “Now pull for your lives!” The oars, from the instinct of self-preservation, instantly fell into the water, and the boat sprang off. Captain Starkey, now that all except himself were clear of the burning ship, gazed eagerly with eyes shaded with his hand in the direction of the shore. Presently he hailed the headmost boat. “We must have been seen from the shore long ago, and pilot-boats ought to be coming out, though I don’t see any. If you meet one, bid him be smart: there may be a chance yet.” All this scene, this long agony, which has taken me so many words to depict very imperfectly from my own recollection, and those of others, only lasted, I was afterward assured by Mr. Desmond, eight minutes from the embarkation of Señora Arguellas till the last boat left the ill-fated _Neptune_. Never shall I forget the frightful sublimity of the spectacle presented by that flaming ship, the sole object, save ourselves, discernible amidst the vast and heaving darkness, if I may use the term, of the night and ocean, coupled as it was with the dreadful thought that the heroic man to whose firmness and presence of mind we all owed our safety was inevitably doomed to perish. We had not rowed more than a couple of hundred yards when the flames, leaping up every where through the deck, reached the rigging and the few sails set, presenting a complete outline of the bark and her tracery of masts and yards drawn in lines of fire! Captain Starkey, not to throw away the chance he spoke of, had gone out to the end of the bowsprit, having first let the jib and foresail go by the run, and was for a brief space safe from the flames; but what was this but a prolongation of the bitterness of death?