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Updated: May 2, 2025
So quickly did this singular glow come and vanish that it must have been mistaken by the sentinels for a part of the lightning display, for it caused no alarm; but the turning of the escape steam into the paddle-box had allowed the soot to get dry, and they flamed up a second time.
Your wife smiles for the first time these ten days; you pass by plantations of ship-masts, and forests of steam-chimneys; the sailors are singing on board the ships, the bargees salute you with oaths, grins, and phrases facetious and familiar; the man on the paddle-box roars, "Ease her, stop her!" which mysterious words a shrill voice from below repeats, and pipes out, "Ease her, stop her!" in echo; the deck is crowded with groups of figures, and the sun shines over all.
The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which.
The heavy-breaking seas of the Channel Islands do not appear to disturb the composure of these birds in the least, for once, on my voyage home on the 16th November, 1871, I saw a small flock of Goosanders off Herm, close to the steamer; they were swimming perfectly unconcerned in a heavy-breaking sea, which made the steamer very lively, dipping first one and then the other paddle-box into the water; as we got close up to them they rose, but only flew a short distance and pitched again in the white water.
Another row was the consequence, at the end of which another piaster was doled out to him, and forward we moved till we were fairly within cry of the ship, when I called out for assistance, and they pushed us directly alongside, behind the paddle-box.
We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the paddle-box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.
Then a sort of spasm of action seized him, and, apparently not knowing what he was about, he threw open the gangway abaft the paddle-box and sprang into the sea. Anglicè, owls. Even with this big steamer coming right down on them, Rob MacNicol did not lose his head.
The heavy sea, which stove in the paddle-box and broke one of the paddles, had also carried away nearly the whole of the bulwarks on that side; the waves, entering every instant by this large opening, swept the decks with irresistible violence, and every time bore away with them some fresh victims.
There was another ship lying close at hand, which Douglas judged to be the fast transport Oroya, because of her paddle wheels, and he made up his mind to attend to her before running back to blow up the Union. He selected her paddle-box as the best place to which to attach the torpedo, and as she, too, was unprotected by any boom, he soon had the bomb fixed in position and the fuse lighted.
At seven p.m., two paddle-box boats, two pinnaces, four cutters, and one gig, nine boats in all, containing 180 officers and men, carrying six twenty-four-pounder howitzers and two twelve-pounders, were sent away under the command of Lieutenant Wise, of the Vulture, who was accompanied by Lieutenants Madden and Burton, Marine Artillery, and by Dr Duncan.
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