I instantly took a fresh crew of soldiers and returned to the bar;
there sat poor Mrs. Ashlock on her chest of clothes, a weeping
widow, who had seen her husband perish amid sharks and waves; she
clung to the hope that the steamer had picked him up, but, strange
to say, he could not swim, although he had been employed on the
water all his life.

Her sister was more demonstrative, and wailed as one lost to all
hope and life. She appealed to us all to do miracles to save the
struggling men in the waves, though two hours had already passed,
and to have gone out then among those heavy breakers, with an
inexperienced crew, would have been worse than suicide. All I
could do was to reorganize the guard at the beach, take the two
desolate females up to the fort, and give them the use of my own
quarters. Very soon their anguish was quieted, and they began to
look, for the return of their steamer with Ashlock and his rescued
crew. The next day I went again to the beach with Lieutenant Ord,
and we found that one or two bodies had been washed ashore, torn
all to pieces by the sharks, which literally swarmed the inlet at
every new tide. In a few days the weather moderated, and the
steamer returned from the south, but the surf was so high that she
anchored a mile off. I went out myself, in the whale or surf boat,
over that terrible bar with a crew of, soldiers, boarded the
steamer, and learned that none other of Ashlock's crew except the
one before mentioned had been saved; but, on the contrary, the
captain of the steamer had sent one of his own boats to their
rescue, which was likewise upset in the surf, and, out of the three
men in her, one had drifted back outside the breakers, clinging to
the upturned boat, and was picked up. This sad and fatal
catastrophe made us all afraid of that bar, and in returning to the