The most terrible consternation and confusion now prevailed. Passengers and crew rushed on deck in the wildest dismay, while the gale which raged overhead increased their fears. To add if possible to the terrors of this awful calamity, the smoke and flames had driven the engineers from their stations, so that the machinery could not be stopped; consequently the _Amazon_ dashed through the waves at full speed. Thus the raging fire, made more fearful by the storm, consumed everything animate and inanimate within its reach, spreading with the most alarming rapidity over the deck of the ship and extending to the cabins below, where many of the passengers were either suffocated by the smoke or consumed by the flames. Recourse was now had to the boats: of these there were nine, including four life-boats. As too often happens in cases of emergency, the boats were neither clear nor ready for lowering. In this instance, too, the life-boats had been fitted with crutches on which their keels rested. These fittings now obstructed their clearance from the sides of the ship, and but for this fatal arrangement so serious a loss of life might have been lessened. To make matters worse, the two best and largest boats had been stowed on the top of the sponsons, which were now surrounded by the flames and could not be approached. When the mail-boat was lowered, it was immediately swamped with twenty-five persons on board, all of whom perished; the pinnace, when lowered, sheered across the sea before the people in her could unhook the foretackle, and they too were all washed out and drowned, except two men who had clung to the thwarts and were enabled to scramble back to the deck of the ship: the boat itself, which hung by the single tackle, was soon afterwards dashed to pieces against the side of the vessel. By extraordinary efforts fourteen of the crew and two of the passengers were enabled to remove from the cranes and lower in safety one of the starboard life-boats, while nineteen of the crew and six of her passengers escaped in another: these, with a young midshipman, named Vincent, who displayed great bravery and intrepidity, the chief steward, one passenger (a young lady), and two of the seamen, who had managed to lower without accident a small boat, the dingy, were the only persons saved out of the 161 who had embarked on board the _Amazon_ only two days previously. All the others perished, including the captain, either by the flames or the waves; and, perhaps, in the melancholy annals of the sea, there is no shipwreck more appalling than that of the _Amazon_. [Sidenote: Terrible sufferings.]