Day came about six, and presented to those on shore a seizing and terrific spectacle.  In the pressure of the squalls the bay was obscured as if by midnight, but between them a great part of it was clearly if darkly visible amid driving mist and rain.  The wind blew into the harbour mouth.  Naval authorities describe it as of hurricane force.  It had, however, few or none of the effects on shore suggested by that ominous word, and was successfully withstood by trees and buildings.  The agitation of the sea, on the other hand, surpassed experience and description.  Seas that might have awakened surprise and terror in the midst of the Atlantic ranged bodily and (it seemed to observers) almost without diminution into the belly of that flask-shaped harbour; and the war-ships were alternately buried from view in the trough, or seen standing on end against the breast of billows.

The Trenton at daylight still maintained her position in the neck of the bottle.  But five of the remaining ships tossed, already close to the bottom, in a perilous and helpless crowd; threatening ruin to each other as they tossed; threatened with a common and imminent destruction on the reefs.  Three had been already in collision:  the Olga was injured in the quarter, the Adler had lost her bowsprit; the Nipsic had lost her smoke-stack, and was making steam with difficulty, maintaining her fire with barrels of pork, and the smoke and sparks pouring along the level of the deck.  For the seventh war-ship the day had come too late; the Eber had finished her last cruise; she was to be seen no more save by the eyes of divers.  A coral reef is not only an instrument of destruction, but a place of sepulchre; the submarine cliff is profoundly undercut, and presents the mouth of a huge antre in which the bodies of men and the hulls of ships are alike hurled down and buried.  The Eber had dragged anchors with the rest; her injured screw disabled her from steaming vigorously up; and a little before day she had struck the front of the coral, come off, struck again, and gone down stern foremost, oversetting as she went, into the gaping hollow of the reef.  Of her whole complement of nearly eighty, four souls were cast alive on the beach; and the bodies of the remainder were, by the voluminous outpouring of the flooded streams, scoured at last from the harbour, and strewed naked on the seaboard of the island.

Five ships were immediately menaced with the same destruction.  The Eber vanished—­the four poor survivors on shore—­read a dreadful commentary on their danger; which was swelled out of all proportion by the violence of their own movements as they leaped and fell among the billows.  By seven the Nipsic was so fortunate as to avoid the reef and beach upon a space of sand; where she was immediately deserted by her crew, with the assistance of Samoans, not without loss of life.  By about eight it was the turn of the Adler.  She