There is a very heavy sea running, and they have a short consultation as to the best method of getting alongside the vessel; they determine to go in upon the lee quarter, and make preparation for so doing. Now they make in for the wreck; they sail in swiftly; plunge in through the broken water; their anchor is all ready; they watch their distance. Over with it; lower the foresail; and they are about to run the life-boat right alongside the vessel, when the man in the bow shouts, "Up with your helm; up with it hard; sheer off, sheer off!" Up the helm is; swiftly the boat answers, and bears away from the vessel. The mizen-mast, which had been broken off short, has fallen over the quarter of the vessel, and become entangled in the Sands, and with the ship's side, and is standing out at right angles to the wreck, right in the way the life-boat was steering. If it had been night-time the boat would have been steered in right upon the wreck of the mast and yards, when in every probability she would have been stove and rolled over by the seas; the men would then have been washed out of her, and it would have been impossible for them to have got back to her again, against the rush of sea and tide and entangled as she would have been in the wreckage of the mast, she could not have floated down to them; as it is, this very catastrophe nearly happens, for the men hardly see the danger in time; it is a moment of great peril, for the boat is being tossed about violently in the broken water, and becomes somewhat entangled in the wreckage; the men lay hold of the cable, and haul upon it with all their strength, and do what they can to check the way of the boat, and help her head round; now they get a good cant out, they throw out some coils of the cable in one cast, they sheer out well, and get clear of the wreck of the mizen-mast; the seas catch the boat and drive it astern of the vessel, the cable runs out its full length and brings the boat up with a strong jerk. The men, on looking at the wreck, are glad to find that there are some of her crew still alive; they can see three men and a boy crouching down, under the shelter of the deck-house, but they must be but a small proportion of the original crew of the ship, for she is a large vessel, and must have had a crew of certainly not fewer than fifteen or sixteen men. "Thank God," say the life-boat men, "that they are not all gone, and that we are here in time to try and save some." The shipwrecked men have been crouching there for some hours, and have been getting more and more wretched, cold, wet, exhausted, and hopeless; every now and then they heard the loud boom of a gun from one of the light-vessels, but no life-boat came, and the wreck might at any moment break up; they at first felt confident that a life-boat would certainly soon come to their rescue, and had prepared for her coming by getting a life-buoy with a long line fastened to it, ready to throw overboard.