Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1875 — Desperate Peril. [ARTICLE]

Desperate Peril.

A Paris.letter says: A thrilling incident of sea life has just" been published here. A young soldier in a letter to his mother relates the following occurrence which took place durine his outward voyage: The vessel Lc was bound to Cayenne, a French penal colony, with many convicts sentenced to transportation on board. The young soldier belonged to a detachment of infantry which was put on board to guard the convicts. Here is his letter: “We numbered, all told, 1,300 soldiers and 100 convicts. We had in the hold 500 tons of powder, 2,000 shells, forty cannons, and about 800 barrels of wine. We left Toulon Ist April. The 25th April we were in about the latitude of Senegal when suddenly, at two o’clock at night, the dreadful crv'wasraised, ‘The hold Is on fire!’ I was sleeping on deck, at the mizen-must’s foot, when 1 was startled from slumber by this terrible •cream: ‘The hold is on tire!’ In the hold was the gunpowder. We despaired of our safety. The bugle signaled, ‘All hands on deck.’ Ip they all came, confusion worse confounded, soldiers and sailors pell-mell, jostling one another down as each tried to be first to escape from the burning hold. The women shrieked, the children bawled, the steam-whistle called for help, incesaantly the minute-guns pealed signals of distress. All these sounds were heard together, an appalling discord. To add to this misery the convicts began to show signs of mutiny, and it became necessary to face them while we gave battle to the fire. All our struggles seemed for a long time to be in vain, for volumes of smoke poured from the hatches and the fissures in the deck and hung in clouds over the vessel so dense as almost to stifle us. We should, had we remained in such an atmosphere for a few moments longer, have died from suffocation, even had the volcano under our feet not entered into eruption. But, thanks be to Heaven, we were not doomed to either one of these frightful deaths. About five a. m. the earnest and pertinacious efforts of the whole crew, led by their officers, succeeded at last in extinguishing the fire and the vessel escaped with comparatively trifling damage, the 3d of May we made land, all being well.”