Some of the crew ultimately pushed off in the boat; others sprang overboard and held on to spars and booms; but these and nearly all the little Palatines perished miserably, after being half scorched. Some were crushed to death by the falling yards and masts. Many held on to the fore and main chains, till these became so unbearably hot, that they had to drop off, with screams of despair, when they sank, faint, weary, and helpless, to the bottom at last. How it all happened Charlie Balgonie never knew, but hours after the whole affair was over, and the detested _Piscatona_ had burned down to her water-line and sunk, leaving all the sea around her discoloured and covered with floating pieces of charred wood and the buoyant parts of her cargo, he found himself adrift in the wide and stormy Pentland Firth; but wedged with comparative safety in a large fragment of the fore-top, to which, the yard being still attached by the sling, a certain amount of steadiness was given; yet his heart leaped painfully, each time, when the fragment of wreck rose on the summit of a green glassy wave, or went surging down into the dark and watery trough between. To add to the terrors of his lonely situation, the sun had sunk amid gloomy purple clouds, and a rainy night was drawing on. Half drowned perhaps, the poor boy soon became faint and exhausted, and would seem to have dropped into a species of stupor; for when roused by the sound of strange voices, he found himself close by a great and towering ship, which lay to, now right in the wind's eye with her main-yard aback, and her gunports and hammock nettings full of weatherbeaten faces, gazing at him with eagerness and curiosity in the twilight, while a boat was lowered from the davits and pulled steadily towards him by six sailors clad in dark green. She proved to be a Russian 50-gun ship, the _Anne Ivanowna_, commanded by Thomas Mackenzie, one of the many Scottish admirals who have bravely carried the Russian flag in the Baltic and the Black Sea, the same officer who a few years after was to build the great harbour and forts of Sebastopol, at the little Tartar village then known as Actiare. His youthful countryman became his _protégé_. The worthy admiral sought to make a sailor of the rescued Palatine; but the latter had seen quite enough of the sea while on board the _Piscatona_, and while he was clinging like a limpet or barnacle to the piece of drifting wreck; so he became a soldier, and served under General Ochterlony, of Guynd, in the Regiment of Smolensko, where, as a cadet, his superior smartness, intelligence and education, not less than his courage, soon distinguished him among his thick-pated Russian comrades: thus, in less than ten years, he became, as we find him, Captain Carl Ivanovitch Balgonie, the most trusted aide-de-camp of Lieutenant-General Weymarn, Commander-in-Chief of the City and District of St. Petersburg. CHAPTER VII. THE SOLDIER OF THE CZARINA.