The one boat which had escaped was crowded with about a hundred persons, dead and living, including some of the chief heroes of the defence. There is no more thrilling tale in fiction than the adventures of that hopeless crew. They had no oars; their rudder was soon broken by a shot. Paddling with bits of plank, they slowly drifted down the Ganges, fired at from either bank. More than once they stuck fast in the sand, and at night the women had to be disembarked before the cumbrous craft could be got off. By daylight they had come only a few miles from Cawnpore. Again were they attacked from the bank, and found themselves pursued by a boat filled with armed men. The torrential rains of an Indian summer burst upon them. They were obliged to tear off the thatched roof of the boat, as the enemy had tried to set it on fire. The second night found them helplessly aground; but a hurricane came to their aid, and the boat floated off before morning, only to drift into a backwater. There they grounded once more, and the enemy soon gathered about them in overpowering numbers. Some dozen men, under Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, waded on shore to beat back the assailants, while the rest made an effort to shove off the boat. This little party, sent out on what seemed a forlorn hope, in the end furnished the only survivors; their leader was one of four who lived to tell the tale. Desperately charging the mob of Sepoys and peasants on the bank, they drove them back for some distance, but soon found themselves surrounded by overwhelming numbers. Without the loss of a man, however, though not without wounds, they cut their way back to the shore, to find the boat gone. Expecting to catch it up, they pushed on down the stream, but could see nothing of it, and had to shift for themselves as best they could. Spread out in open order to give less mark for bullets, they held together, loading and firing upon the rabble that pressed at their heels, yet not too near, like a cowardly pack of wolves. When the hunted Englishmen had toiled some two or three miles barefoot over rough ground, a temple appeared in the distance, for which the officer shaped his course. Mowbray Thomson himself, in his _Story of Cawnpore_, describes the last stand made here by this remnant of its garrison. "I instantly set four of the men crouching in the doorway with bayonets fixed, and their muskets so placed as to form a _cheval-de-frise_ in the narrow entrance. The mob came on helter-skelter, in such maddening haste that some of them fell or were pushed on to the bayonets, and their transfixed bodies made the barrier impassable to the rest, upon whom we, from behind our novel defence, poured shot upon shot into the crowd. The situation was the more favourable to us, in consequence of the temple having been built upon a base of brickwork three feet from the ground, and approached by steps on one side....