The boats quickly picked them up one after the other, none, happily, of the party left on board being missing. Neither the officer nor any of the men could account for the accident. They were all on deck, the sentry near the hold in which the prisoners were confined; suddenly an explosion occurred which lifted up a portion of the deck, and sent the sentry and two other men standing near him overboard. Flames instantly afterwards burst out both fore and aft, and the natural impulse of the rest was to leap into the water to save their lives. The master's assistant, who commanded the party, seeing that any attempt to rescue the prisoners would be utterly hopeless, to save his own life was compelled to follow his men. Just as the last English seaman was picked up, the dhow's stern, already a mass of flames, lifted, and she glided down, bow foremost, beneath the surface; a few pieces of charred wood and bamboo marking the spot where she had lately floated. "Serve the fellows right," observed several of the men who were watching the occurrence; "the hangman has been saved a job, and stout rope left for a better purpose." Murray and Adair, although acknowledging that the murderers, as they deemed them, had met with a just fate, could not help regretting that all means of obtaining information as to what had become of the midshipmen and their companions had thus been lost. "All I can now do," said Murray, "is to cruise over the ground the dhow must have traversed after you left her, and look out for the canoe, in case any of the party may have succeeded in getting into her. It is possible that some of them may have done so, although in this long interval they must have suffered fearfully for want of food." As no time was to be lost, Murray returned on board, leaving Adair with his party still on the island. The corvette, immediately weighing anchor, stood away close--hauled to the eastward, that she might on another tack fetch the spot where her search was to begin. Murray's remarks had slightly raised Adair's hopes that one if not both of the midshipmen might have been saved, had they been hove overboard alive; but it was too probable that the Arabs would have knocked them on the head first, and then thrown them into the water. He expressed his thoughts to Green. "I don't altogether give them up," answered Jos. "Midshipmen have a wonderful way of keeping in existence, and by some means or other they may have escaped, though I can't say how it may have happened."