Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

ARCH AND SPANDREL WALL MOULDING FRAMES IN PLAGE. Stories of Disasters. 136 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. Kelly jumped for the barge as it sped past, and Kennedy was at his heels. A gray sea rose and swallowed them, and their comrades counted them as lost. Almost a week later, the barge was picked up with Kelly and Ken- nedy aboard, crazed and almost dead for want of food and water. They recovered, and re- turned to the keys. As many as eighty-seven of these quarter-boat men were picked up out of the sea alive. With remarkable strength, and with courage truly indomitable, they had ridden out the hurricane clinging to bits of wreckage, to tables, and to trunks. The Italian steamer Jenny passed them late in the afternoon of the day of the wreck, found forty-four of them, and took them into Key- West. Her boats risked the dangerous seas all night long, and it is tragic to record that they heard the voices of others in the dark- ness, but were unable to locate the calls for help The British steamer Alton picked up twenty-six more, and landed them at Savan- nah. For days and weeks news of other castaways came from distant ports—Mobile, Galveston, New York, London, Liverpool, and even from Buenos Aires, whither they had been taken by ships. “ Of forty-nine men who went to sea in two houseboats, only one, John Russell, was saved. He floated on a couple of planks for three days, was blinded by salt water, and heard ships pass him in the night before he was seen and picked up and taken into New York. There was something fine about the finish of one—Mullin—left in charge of a cement-mixing plant on board a barge. He was alone when she was blown out to sea, but there was an electric light plant on board his craft, and as long as those on shore could see her in the gray dawn, Mullin’s lights were blaz- ing like a Coney Island steamboat. He was