This now “collapsible boat,” with its folding canvas sides, is of course shallow, and about three or four of them can be nested on the deck of a steamer in the space occupied by a “real lifeboat.” There is a canvas cover laced down over the top of these boats, the same as on regular boats. Before you can do anything with a collapsible lifeboat you must make it a “real boat” by lifting up its canvas sides and lashing them in place so they can’t collapse. Until this is done you have nothing but a “raft.” It is almost impossible to lift the rail into place if there are people hanging on to it, as that would mean lifting the people as well. Also, you can’t lift the sides, which automatically raise the cross seats, if there is anyone lying across the boat, and you can’t get on the “raft” without getting on the seats. We tried to persuade the people who were hanging on to the rail to take off their hands and hang on to the life ropes--but that was impossible. Never have I heard a more distressing cry of despair than when I tried to tell one of them that that was what we were doing. In their condition I don’t wonder they thought we were trying to push them off. So we had to take some aboard, those who were in the most panicky condition, and try to get up the sides with the “raft” half covered with people. The seats of these boats are attached to an iron brace which is supposed to slide on a metal run in the middle of the boat. A wooden brace at either end is held in place by a pin when the sides are raised to their proper height, but, as the saying is, “There warn’t no pin” and the wooden brace in my end of the boat was broken and the metal run for the iron braces of the seats was so rusted and corroded that it wasn’t a “run;” so there we were, back to a raft again. _Not an oar in the boat_, nor even a stick with which to reach wreckage so that we could block up the seats. We must get those seats braced up to give us the protection of the canvas sides, and they mustn’t fall down either, because then the “boat” became a “raft,” the people became a little more panicky, and the falling seats hurt and slightly injured the people sitting between them, for of course we had to seat those too exhausted to pull and haul on the floor between the seats. We had to have some oars too to make the boat navigable, so we fished round in the wreckage and were fortunate to get five oars (one broken, but that served me as a steering oar) and some blocks. Then with a long heave and a heave all together we raised the blasted seats as far as possible, but not to their proper height, and jammed the blocks under them. We were lucky to get blocks that act as supports to a _real_ lifeboat, which, as you know, have notches cut on the long side. These blocks are like little steps, so that we were able to shove them under the seats to the limit.