Explore "The Burning of the "Sarah Sands"" by Rudyard Kipling on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
_Men have sailed the seas for so many years, and have there done such amazing things in the face of danger, difficulty and death, that no one tale of heroism exists which cannot be equalled by at least scores of others. But since the behaviour of bodies of untried men under trying circumstances is always interesting, and since I have been put in possession of some facts not very generally known, I am trying to tell again the old story of the_ Sarah Sands, _as an example of long-drawn-out and undefeatable courage and cool-headedness._
She was a small four-masted, iron-built screw-steamer of eleven hundred tons, chartered to take out troops to India. That was in 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny, when anything that could sail or steer was in great demand; for troops were being thrown into the country as fast as circumstances allowed-which was not very fast.