a ship on fire.

In pages 12, 169, 171, 196, 226, 242, we learn something of the
terrible consequences of being exposed to fogs and mist, ice and snow.
In page 27, we have a vivid picture of a combination of these terrors;
and in pages 217, 268, the most appalling of all the dangers a sailor
has to encounter is brought in view.

We will hope that the rigours and perils of the blockade system, which
occasioned so fearful a loss of life at different periods of the late
war, but especially in the disastrous year 1811, are at end for ever.
From page 154 to 159, and from 168 to 186, the accounts of the loss of
life in the Baltic and North Seas alone occur in fearful succession;
and the magnanimity with which hundreds, nay, thousands of our bravest
officers and men met death on that most perilous of all services, has
rendered the names of British blockading ships memorable in the annals
of hardship, hardihood, and suffering. Many invaluable lives perished
from the inclemency of the weather; men were frozen to death at their
posts. It is recorded of one devoted officer, Lieutenant Topping, that
rushing on deck in anxiety for his ship, without giving himself time
to put on his clothes, 'in fifteen minutes he fell upon the deck a
corpse, stricken by the piercing blast and driving snow,' (p. 169.)

In page 174, we read of the bodies of the dead, victims to the cold
and tempest, piled up by the survivors in rows one above another, on
the deck of the St. George, to serve as a shelter against the violence
of the waves and weather. 'In the fourth row lay the bodies of the
Admiral and his friend Captain Guion;' and out of a crew of 750, seven
only were saved.