The captain was expatiating in a low conversational tone to the chief mate upon the danger of these derelicts, and upon his dread of coming upon them at night, when suddenly a man forward screamed out, “There’s people on board of her, sir!  I see them!” in a most extraordinary voice—­a voice never heard before in our ship; the amazing voice of a stranger.  It gave the signal for a sudden tumult of shouts.  The watch below ran up the forecastle head in a body, the cook dashed out of the galley.  Everybody saw the poor fellows now.  They were there!  And all at once our ship, which had the well-earned name of being without a rival for speed in light winds, seemed to us to have lost the power of motion, as if the sea, becoming viscous, had clung to her sides.  And yet she moved.  Immensity, the inseparable companion of a ship’s life, chose that day to breathe upon her as gently as a sleeping child.  The clamour of our excitement had died out, and our living ship, famous for never losing steerage way as long as there was air enough to float a feather, stole, without a ripple, silent and white as a ghost, towards her mutilated and wounded sister, come upon at the point of death in the sunlit haze of a calm day at sea.

With the binoculars glued to his eyes, the captain said in a quavering tone:  “They are waving to us with something aft there.”  He put down the glasses on the skylight brusquely, and began to walk about the poop.  “A shirt or a flag,” he ejaculated irritably.  “Can’t make it out. . .  Some damn rag or other!” He took a few more turns on the poop, glancing down over the rail now and then to see how fast we were moving.  His nervous footsteps rang sharply in the quiet of the ship, where the other men, all looking the same way, had forgotten themselves in a staring immobility.  “This will never do!” he cried out suddenly.  “Lower the boats at once!  Down with them!”

Before I jumped into mine he took me aside, as being an inexperienced junior, for a word of warning: 

“You look out as you come alongside that she doesn’t take you down with her.  You understand?”

He murmured this confidentially, so that none of the men at the falls should overhear, and I was shocked.  “Heavens! as if in such an emergency one stopped to think of danger!” I exclaimed to myself mentally, in scorn of such cold-blooded caution.

It takes many lessons to make a real seaman, and I got my rebuke at once.  My experienced commander seemed in one searching glance to read my thoughts on my ingenuous face.

“What you’re going for is to save life, not to drown your boat’s crew for nothing,” he growled severely in my ear.  But as we shoved off he leaned over and cried out:  “It all rests on the power of your arms, men.  Give way for life!”