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Show Rescue of the Monitor's Survivors. From a paper on the loss of the Monitor, accompanying Captain Ericsson's account of his vessels in the December Century, we quote the following : "After a fearful and dangerous passage over the frantic seas, we reached the Rhode Island, which still had the tow-line caught in her wheel and had drifted perhaps two miles to lee-, ward. We came alongside under the lee bows, where the first boat that had left the Monitor, nearly an hour before, had just discharged its men ; but we found that getting on board the Rhode Island was a harder task than getting from the Monitor. We were carried by the sea from stem to stern, for to have made fast would have been fatal ; the boat was bounding against the ship's sides ; some-; times it was below the wheel, and then, on the summit of a huge wave, far above the decks ; then thetwo boats would crash together ; and once, while surgeon Weeks was holding on to the rail, he lost his fingers by a collision which swamped . the other boat. Lines were thrown to us from the deck of the Rhode Island; which were of no assistance, for-not one of us could climb a small rope ; and besides, the men who threw them would immediately imme-diately let go their holds, in their excitement excite-ment to throw another which I found to be the case when I. kept hauling in rope instead of climbing. It must be understood that two vessels lying side by side, when there is any motion mo-tion to the sea, move alternately ; or in other words, oneis constantly passing the other up and down. At one time when our boat was near the bows of the steamer, we would rise upon the sea until un-til we could reach her rail ; then in an instant, in-stant, by a very rapid descent, we could touch her keel. While we were thus ris ing and falling upon the sea, I caught a rope, and rising with the boat managed to reach within a foot or two of the rail, when a man, if there had been one, could easily have hauled me on board. But they had all followed after the boat, which at that instant was washed astern, and I hung dangling in the air over the bow of the Rhode Island, with Ensign Norman Atwater hanging to the cat-head, three or four feet from me, like myself, with both hands clinching a rope and shouting for some one to save him. . Our hands grew painful . and all the time weaker, until .1 saw his strength give way. He slipped a foot, caught again, and with his last prayer, "0 God !" I saw him fall to sink, and rise no more. The ship rolled, and rose upon the sea, sometimes some-times with her keel out of the water, so that I was hanging thirty feet above the sea, and with the fate in view that had fallen our much-beloved companion, which no one had witnessed but myself. I still clung to the rope with aching hands, calling in vain for help. But I could not be heard, for the wind shrieked far above my voice. My heart here, for the only time in my life, gave up hope, and home and friends were most tenderly ten-derly thought of. While I was in this state, within a few seconds of giving up, the sea rolled forward, bringing with it the boat, and when I would have fallen into the sea, it was there. I - only recollect recol-lect hearing an old sailor say, a's I fell into the bottom of the' boat, "where in did he come from.. - . |