By the help of the most sober of the sailors, the captain’s own boat was lowered; some small mattresses, pillows, blankets, a cask of water, sacks of biscuit, and nautical instruments, were first put in; then the passengers were let down by ropes. “It seems marvellous,” says Mrs. Murray, “when I think of it now, that in our descent we were not dashed to pieces against the ship’s side. We had to wait for each descent a favourable moment while she was leaning over. Then the word of command was given, and we were slung down like sheep. My heart stood still whilst my little one was going down, and then I followed. It was a terrible sight for a woman to see that poor creature whose baby was born the night before, looking like a corpse in a long dressing‐gown of white flannel, with the poor little atom of mortality tightly clasped in her arms. I thought she would die before the day was over.” At last they were all in the boat: four women, five children, the second mate, and sixteen sailors. The captain stayed on the ship, providing for the safety of the drunken creatures who could not take care of themselves, and then he came off. How small the boat looked by the side of the tall ship! And they had to get quickly out of her reach, for she was rolling so heavily that the waters near her boiled up like a maelström. Away they drifted, a mere speck upon the ocean. Before night there came a storm of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, that lasted through the darkness, and by which they were drenched through and through. “I sat up,” says the narrator, “for some twelve or fourteen hours on a narrow plank, with my child in my arms, utterly miserable, cold, and hopeless, soaked to the skin, blinded by the salt spray, my face and hands smarting intolerably with the unusual exposure.” During the storm and confusion the greater part of their biscuit had been soaked with salt water, and made useless. It was also discovered that the food collected for the captain’s boat had been thrown by mistake into the other, therefore it was necessary at once to put them on allowance: half a pint of water and half a biscuit a day to each person. Except the biscuit, there were only a few small tins of preserved strawberries and Indian corn, and these were given to the ladies. “How the poor children cried with hunger as the days dragged on!” The boat leaked from the beginning, and the sailors by turns baled the water out in little cans. Exposed to the glare of a tropical sun for hours together, nearly mad with thirst, bearing her child in her weak arms, for she was too much exhausted to stand, Mrs. Murray says that often she would sit for hours without any thought at all, vacantly gazing on the ocean.