Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
The captain of the vessel could not get on board in the same way, and though they passed a line round his waist it was a good half-hour before they could get him up the steep side. The lifeboatmen say that when he did reach the deck he declared 'that if that was what they called coming hoff in a lifeboat from Deal beach, he wouldn't do it again no, not for hall the money in the Bank of England!
Anyone attempting it would either have been dashed to pieces against her, or lifted bodily over her, brained very possibly, and certainly washed away to leeward, return from which would have been, even for an uninjured man, impossible. And still the lifeboatmen waited and called; but there was no answer. Poor Marsh had been suddenly summoned to meet his God.
The Lifeboat Institution gave him a generous donation. But the rescues by the Deal lifeboatmen are done at the risk, and sometimes at the cost, of their health, their limbs and their lives.
The lifeboatmen then got up anchor, and with twelve Swedes, five Frenchmen, and their own crew of fifteen made for home. Deep plunged the lifeboat, and wearily she rose at each sea, but still she struggled towards Deal, as the wounded stag comes home to die. Her fore and after air-boxes were full of water, for a man could creep into the rent in her bows, and she had lost much of her buoyancy.
She was also lifted by each wave and hammered over the sand into shallower water, so that the drenched and buffeted lifeboatmen had to lift anchor and follow the drifting vessel in the lifeboat, and again drop anchor and veer down as before. All this time three powerful steam-tugs were waiting in deep water to help the vessel, but they dared not come into the surf where the lifeboat lay.
Again the tug-boat passed her hawser on board the lifeboat, and once more towed her to windward to the same position as before; and once again, burning to save the despairing sailors, the lifeboatmen dropped anchor and veered out their last remaining cable, well-knowing this was the last chance, as they had only the one remaining cable.
The lifeboat was now on the port bow of the Mandalay, which lay fast on the Sands with her head to the S.W., and the coxswains laid out a kedge or small anchor, with warp attached, to the N.E., five of the lifeboatmen remaining in the lifeboat with Roberts, the coxswain, to direct the course of action on the Sands, while Hanger, the second coxswain, went on board with seven lifeboatmen to direct operations there, and to heave on the warp, in order to move the vessel.
At the helm, in dire anxiety, was Jarvist Arnold, and with him were in the lifeboat only seven of his crew, the remainder of them being entrapped on board the Sorrento, together with the Walmer lifeboatmen.
So hot it was from the flames that they could not if they would go to leeward of her, and they kept to windward, witnessing the spectacle of a ship on fire in a midnight 'hurricane from the west. There was no one on board of the burning ship, and no one knows the fate of her crew. Sadly the lifeboatmen returned to the land.
Ten years more fly by, in which there is a splendid record of services and rescues to the credit of Coxswain Fish, the Ramsgate lifeboatmen, and the brave steam-tugs, Vulcan and Aid, and we come to the night of Jan. 5 and 6, 1891, which is exactly, my readers will see, ten years to the day after the rescue of the survivors of the Indian Chief, a rescue certainly unsurpassed for its dramatic intensity and its heroism even by the Deal lifeboat.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking