No writer of romance in the wildest dreams of fancy could have pictured a scene more terrible than this reality. Young Vincent, in his vivid narrative, describes two passengers rushing from their cabins enveloped in flames and falling lifeless upon deck. He speaks of a lady, with an infant in her arms, entreating some one to take care of her child, heedless of her own safety, but before assistance could be rendered perishing with her child amid the flames. Others, he says, fled from them, only to be engulfed in the ocean. One lady passenger, who had been lifted into the boat, was so terrified by the waves which dashed over the sides of the ship that she preferred death among the flames, and wildly rushed back to her destruction. Others fell through the burning decks or hatchways, and were instantly consumed, while some resigned themselves calmly to their terrible fate; when Vincent left the ship he states that “some of those who yet lived were kneeling on the deck in prayer, while others, almost in a state of nudity, were running about screaming with terror.” Between three and four o’clock in the morning the masts of the vessel fell over her sides; the foremast on the port and the mainmast on the starboard, but the mizen still stood while the fire raged from stem to stern. One poor fellow then appeared perched on the extreme end of the jib-boom, the only living thing amidst the burning mass; but he, too, perished. About five in the morning, when the life-boat was “passing the ship in a leewardly direction,” the gunpowder in her magazines exploded, and in about twenty minutes afterwards, the mizenmast went by the board; the vessel herself then making a heavy lurch, as if eager to escape from the flames, went down, her funnels still standing, but red hot, with everything on board which the fire, in its fury, had left unconsumed. [Sidenote: Loss of the _Demerara_.]