Before I could get up three men tumbled in on
top of me. Two of them were dead.
"Captain Muggah went overboard, still clinging to the fragments of his
wrecked bridge. Daniel Taylor, the ship's cooper, and a Kitts native
jumped overboard to save him. Taylor managed to push the captain on to
a hatch that had floated off from us and then they swam back to the ship
for more assistance, but nothing could be done for the captain. Taylor
wasn't sure he was alive. The last we saw of him or his dead body it was
drifting shoreward on that hatch.
"Well, after staying in the fo'c's'l about twenty minutes I went out on
deck. There were just four of us left aboard who could do anything.
The four were Thompson, Dan Taylor, Quashee, and myself. It was still
raining fire and hot rocks and you could hardly see a ship's length for
dust and ashes, but we could stand that. There were burning men and some
women and two or three children lying around the deck. Not just burned,
but burning, then, when we got to them. More than half the ship's
company had been killed in that first rush of flame. Some had rolled
overboard when the tidal wave came and we never saw so much as their
bodies. The cook was burned to death in his galley. He had been paring
potatoes for dinner and what was left of his right hand held the shank
of his potato knife. The wooden handle was in ashes. All that happened
to a man in less than a minute. The donkey engineman was killed on deck
sitting in front of his boiler.
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