Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters, was coming out from England with his wife; on July 1st Shelley and Williams sailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them into the ground-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa. His business despatched, Shelley returned from Pisa to Leghorn, with Hunt's copy of Keats's 'Hyperion' in his pocket to read on the voyage home. Though the weather looked threatening, he put to sea again on July 8th, with Williams and an English sailor-boy. Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht, but was turned back by the authorities because he had no port-clearance. The air was sultry and still, with a storm brewing, and he went down to his cabin and slept. When he awoke, it was to see fishing-boats running into harbour under bare poles amid the hubbub of a thunder-squall. In that squall the 'Ariel' disappeared. It is doubtful whether the unseaworthy craft was merely swamped, or whether, as there is some reason to suppose, an Italian felucca ran her down with intent to rob the Englishmen. In any case, the calamity is the crowning example of that combination of bad management and bad luck which dogged Shelley all his life. It was madness to trust an open boat, manned only by the inexperienced Williams and a boy (for Shelley was worse than useless), to the chances of a Mediterranean storm. And destiny turns on trifles; if the 'Bolivar' had been allowed to sail, Trelawny might have saved them. He sent out search-parties, and on July 19th sealed the despairing women's certainty of disaster by the news that the bodies had been washed ashore. Shelley's was identified by a copy of Sophocles in one coat-pocket and the Keats in another. What Trelawny then did was an action of that perfect fitness to which only the rarest natures are prompted: he charged himself with the business of burning the bodies. This required some organisation. There were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials had to be assembled--the fuel, the improvised furnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre. In his artless 'Records' he describes the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body was given to the flames on a day of intense heat, when the islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the background the marble-flecked Apennines gleamed. Byron looked on until he could stand it no longer, and swam off to his yacht. The heart was the last part to be consumed. By Trelawny's care the ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.