they had roused, and, reaching the eastern shores of the island, embarked for England.  Their incursion would hardly have been felt had they come alone; but the Irish, collected in unnatural numbers, began to feel the inroads of famine, and they followed in the wake of the Americans for England also.  The crossing of the sea could not arrest their progress.  The harbours of the desolate sea-ports of the west of Ireland were filled with vessels of all sizes, from the man of war to the small fishers’ boat, which lay sailorless, and rotting on the lazy deep.  The emigrants embarked by hundreds, and unfurling their sails with rude hands, made strange havoc of buoy and cordage.  Those who modestly betook themselves to the smaller craft, for the most part achieved their watery journey in safety.  Some, in the true spirit of reckless enterprise, went on board a ship of an hundred and twenty guns; the vast hull drifted with the tide out of the bay, and after many hours its crew of landsmen contrived to spread a great part of her enormous canvass—­the wind took it, and while a thousand mistakes of the helmsman made her present her head now to one point, and now to another, the vast fields of canvass that formed her sails flapped with a sound like that of a huge cataract; or such as a sea-like forest may give forth when buffeted by an equinoctial north-wind.  The port-holes were open, and with every sea, which as she lurched, washed her decks, they received whole tons of water.  The difficulties were increased by a fresh breeze which began to blow, whistling among the shrowds, dashing the sails this way and that, and rending them with horrid split, and such whir as may have visited the dreams of Milton, when he imagined the winnowing of the arch-fiend’s van-like wings, which encreased the uproar of wild chaos.  These sounds were mingled with the roaring of the sea, the splash of the chafed billows round the vessel’s sides, and the gurgling up of the water in the hold.  The crew, many of whom had never seen the sea before, felt indeed as if heaven and earth came ruining together, as the vessel dipped her bows in the waves, or rose high upon them.  Their yells were drowned in the clamour of elements, and the thunder rivings of their unwieldy habitation—­they discovered at last that the water gained on them, and they betook themselves to their pumps; they might as well have laboured to empty the ocean by bucketfuls.  As the sun went down, the gale encreased; the ship seemed to feel her danger, she was now completely water-logged, and presented other indications of settling before she went down.  The bay was crowded with vessels, whose crews, for the most part, were observing the uncouth sportings of this huge unwieldy machine—­they saw her gradually sink; the waters now rising above her lower decks—­they could hardly wink before she had utterly disappeared, nor could the place where the sea had closed over her be at all discerned.  Some few of her crew were saved, but the greater part clinging to her cordage and masts went down with her, to rise only when death loosened their hold.