An effort was made to smoke out, and then to burn out, the unconquerable sahibs. When these devices failed, gunpowder was brought up, and arrangements made for blowing the entire shrine, with its indomitable garrison, into space. Seeing these preparations, the British charged out. Seven of them, who could swim, stripped themselves, and headed the sally, intending to break through to the river. Seven naked sahibs, charging through smoke and flame, with levelled bayonets, would naturally be a somewhat disquieting apparition, and the seven had no difficulty in breaking through their enemies, and reaching the Ganges. The other six, who could not swim, ran full into the Sepoy mass, and died mute and fighting. Then commenced the pursuit of the swimmers. Two were soon shot and sank; a third, swimming on his back, and not seeing where he was going, struck a sandspit, where some natives were waiting to beat out his brains at leisure. There remained four—Mowbray Thomson, Delafosse, and two privates, a pair of strong-limbed and brave-hearted Irishmen, named Murphy and Sullivan. This heroic and much-enduring four, diving like wild ducks at the flash of hostile muskets, out-swam and out-tired their pursuers. When at last they landed, they had between them “a flannel shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds”! They found refuge with a friendly landowner, and reached the British lines, though Sullivan died within a fortnight of reaching the place of safety. Meanwhile, what had happened to the boat after the gallant fourteen left it? Its crew consisted of little else than wounded men, dead bodies, and exhausted women and children. Upon these swooped down a great crowd of enemies. The boat was captured, and its stem promptly turned back towards Cawnpore. On the morning of June 30, the boat lay again at the entrance of the fatal ghaut. In the evidence taken long afterwards, there were brought back, according to one native witness, sixty sahibs, twenty-five memsahibs, and four children. “The Nana ordered the sahibs to be separated from the memsahibs, and shot. So the sahibs were seated on the ground, and two companies of the Nadiree Regiment stood ready to fire. Then said one of the memsahibs, the doctor’s wife (What doctor? How should I know?) ‘I will not leave my husband. If he must die, I will die with him.’ So she ran and sat down behind her husband, clasping him round the waist. Directly she said this, the other memsahibs said, ‘We also will die with our husbands,’ and they all sat down, each with her husband. Then their husbands said, ‘Go back,’ but they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered his soldiers; and they, going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they could not pull away the doctor’s wife.”