Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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When this man had got on the block he observed the admiral’s baker in the shrouds of the mizentop-mast, which were above water not far off; and directly after, the poor woman whom he had pulled out of the porthole came rolling by. He called out to the baker to reach out his arm and catch her, which was done. She hung, quite insensible, for some time by her chin over one of the ratlines of the shrouds, but a surf soon washed her off again. She was again rescued shortly after, and life was not extinct; she recovered her senses when taken on board our old friend the Victory, then lying with other large ships near the Royal George. The captain of the latter was saved, but the poor carpenter, who did his best to save the ship, was drowned.

In a few days after the Royal George sank, bodies would come up, thirty or forty at a time. A corpse would rise “so suddenly as to frighten any one.” The watermen, there is no doubt, made a good thing of it; they took from the bodies of the men their buckles, money, and watches, and then made fast a rope to their heels and towed them to land.” The writer of the narrative from which this account is mainly derived says that he “saw them towed into Portsmouth Harbour, in their mutilated condition, in the same manner as rafts of floating timber, and promiscuously (for particularity was scarcely possible) put into carts, which conveyed them to their final sleeping-place, in an excavation prepared for them in Kingstown churchyard, the burial-place belonging to the parish of Portsea.” Many bodies were washed ashore on the Isle of Wight.