Rear-Admiral Foley, admiral-superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, kindly invited me to be his guest to take part in the salvage operations arranged for the raising of the _Eurydice_. That occasion was, I think, the first upon which the newly invented wire hawsers were actually tested in practical work. When they were introduced it was thought that they would not be flexible enough for their purpose. They were, however, used with great success in raising the _Eurydice_. The hawsers were passed under the hull of the sunken ship and secured to lighters moored on either side of her. As the tide went down, the hawsers were hove taut, and water was {155} let into the lighters so that they should be brought as low in the water as possible. The water was then pumped out of the lighters, thus putting the utmost strain upon the hawsers. Then, as the rising of the tide exerted a powerful lift upon lighters and hawsers, the lighters were towed towards the shore, in order to drag the wreck upon the beach. As soon as she grounded, the hawsers were fleeted and the whole process gone through again until at low tide she was nearly high and dry. My old ship, the _Thunderer_, which took a hawser to her after capstan to tow the _Eurydice_, had the solid iron spindle of the capstan pulled right out of her, as a long nail is bent and dragged out of a piece of timber. I well remember the intense excitement when the wreck first shifted from her bed. Eventually we hauled her up the beach. I was just then taking a bearing for Admiral Foley, and could not have given a better holloa if I had viewed a fox. Before the water was pumped out of her, and as she lay on her side on the beach, I climbed in at a porthole, and sat there waiting till I could enter. As the water fell, I saw emerge the sentry's clock on the main-deck. The hands had stopped at 4.5. The bodies lay in heaps, tangled amid ropes; some had lost a head and some a limb. Black mud had filtered in everywhere, even (as Sir Edward Seymour remarks) into the closed drawers of the chests in the cabins. When, as a cadet, I was learning to heave the lead from the chains of the _Eurydice_, which, as I have already related, was then moored off Haslar Creek in Portsmouth Harbour, I little thought I should one day help to raise her from the bottom of the sea. Dr. Boyd Carpenter (late Bishop of Ripon), in his charming volume of recollections, _Some Pages of my Life_, narrates a remarkable story concerning the _Eurydice_, as it was told to him. Sir John MacNeill was the Bishop's cousin and, like other members of his family, had the gift of second sight. {156}