Again, and almost immediately, they hear the loud boom of the gun; but as previously it seemed to them the signal of death, so now it affords them a faint--a very faint hope; rockets too are fired by the light-vessel; surely the signals will be heard and seen on shore, and the life-boat will come out in search of them; but where will they be then? There is no time--no time; the seas are washing over the deck, the fierce fire of the tar-barrel is at once extinguished, and the men hasten to take refuge from the sweeping seas in the cross-trees and shrouds of the masts. Seven men spring to the foremast shrouds, and climb to the cross-trees, the captain and four men cling to the mainmast; time after time the vessel lifts and falls with a crash that wrenches her from stem to stern, and makes all her timbers groan and rend, and nearly shakes the sailors from their hold. Now the ship begins to work and writhe, the timbers break with loud reports, planks are wrenched from her side in the fierce tear of the sea, stout iron bolts are torn from their hold and twisted like so much thread--the ship is breaking up fast; the masts sway about, the men have to hold on their hardest to prevent being shaken into the sea, so are they tossed and swung about in the roll of the mast and the sway of the vessel. Each wave leaping higher than those that have gone before, seems to claim them for its prey; everything on the deck is swept away; the deck itself opens, the water gets down into the hold, and soon the deck breaks up, and pieces float away in the wash of the sea; the bulwarks are torn off, and now a piece of the side of the vessel is wrenched away; the vessel must be torn to fragments in a few short minutes, and death seems very near to all the crew. A tremendous wave rushes over the wreck, a crash louder than a thunder peal; the foremast has broken off close to the deck, it falls over; a few loud despairing cries, and the seven poor fellows who clung to the mast are hurled into the sea, and are at once lost in the wild rage of water. The five men on the mainmast shudder in their terror and despair, and cling closer and closer to the mast as it sways and jerks from side to side; there may be a few minutes yet to live; they think of home and wife and children, and hold on the more convulsively while the seas break over them with increasing violence; it takes but a short time, and the wreck beneath them seems in absolute fragments; the poop-deck is wrenched up, and a large piece of it is torn away; at the next sea the wreck heels over, the mainmast is carried away, and the captain and the four men are hurled from it into the sea; the captain is thrown against a large fragment of deck with such force that both his legs are broken; he, however, manages to hold on to the piece of wreck, the other four men are also swept to it, and there cling; they find themselves surrounded by the hundred fragments of wreck into which the stout brig has been so rapidly torn.