At seven o’clock, just as dawn was beginning to break, we passed a hundred yards to windward of her, took up a favourable position a short distance beyond, and swung our main yard. She was a large three-masted bark-rigged steamer, a passenger vessel, I saw with increasing alarm. Her main and mizzen masts had already been burned away, the middle section of her hull was red-hot like a stove, and the sheet of solid flame that we’d been watching for hours rose above her with a steady appalling roar, as if a great bellows were blowing under her keel. It had been apparent to us from the first that nobody could be left aboard—nobody left alive, that is. I felt certain, however, that if they had managed to get away in the boats, they’d be clinging to the vicinity of the disaster, in the knowledge that she would attract everything afloat through a radius of fifty miles or more. Almost immediately, this notion was confirmed; we sighted a bright light on the water just astern of the steamer, then another, and in a few minutes three flare-ups were burning in as many boats and as many directions. Nothing for us to do but keep our mainyard aback and let them row to us. Thus fifteen or twenty minutes passed, while I was on tenterhooks over the ship’s situation. At length, after a desperate struggle, they dragged one by one under our lee. The mate had charge of getting the people aboard. Men in the main channels passed a bow and stern line to each boat, others fended them off with boat-hooks, still others helped the castaways over the rail. It was a lucky chance that we reached them when we did; the three boats were badly overloaded, half full of water, the wind by this time was breezing on sharply, and the sea making up minute by minute. They wouldn’t have been able to keep themselves afloat another hour. The captain’s boat was the first to come alongside. I saw them pass up a woman with a year-old baby, then an invalid man. Next came another woman, who proved to be the stewardess of the steamer; she was carrying a heavy parcel done up in a tablecloth, that rattled and jangled like a bag of doubloons. In an overloaded boat, in half a gale of wind, she had salvaged the ship’s tableware! The rest of the crowd were indiscriminate; except for the women, of whom there weren’t many, I couldn’t tell passengers from crew. As I stood watching at the break of the poop, a man with a long beard and a blanket wrapped around him came up to me. He seemed half dazed; he was carrying in his hand a small hatchet, the blade stained with blood. "What the devil are you doing with that thing?" I demanded. "I killed the ox, sir" he answered wildly—it came over me in a flash that he must be the cook. "I couldn’t leave him there to burn"