of 1876.  The United States will then offer to the shipwrecked voyager security and protection through her vast extent of coast such as is afforded by no other nation.  The measures promoting this end were carried through Congress by Senators Newell, Stockton, Hamlin, Boutwell, Chandler and Frelinghuysen, and Representatives Lynch, Hale of Maine, Cox, Hooper and Conger.  But the actual credit of this great national work of humanity is due to Sumner I. Kimball, who not only conceived the idea of the complete guarding of the coast and prepared the bill for Congress, but has reorganized the entire system and carried it out successfully in all of its minute practical details.

The work accomplished by the service may be clearly understood by a glance at the following figures.  There is no record of the loss of life on stranded vessels previous to its formation in 1848.  There remain only the terrible legends, such as those which the captain and Jacob told us, of numbers of emigrant ships and steamers yearly going down with three to four hundred souls on board.  The coasts of Long Island and New Jersey have justly been called “the despair of mariners and shipowners.”  During the first twenty years of the operation of the service, despite its mismanagement, the number of lives lost yearly was reduced to an average of twenty-five.  Since 1871 the period of its reorganization, the loss of life on the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island has averaged but one per annum.  The report for these four years, inclusive of the whole coast guarded by stations, is—­

Total number of disasters, 185 Total number of lives imperiled, 2583 Total number of lives saved, 2564 Total number of lives lost, 19 Total number of shipwrecked persons sheltered at the stations, 368 Total number of days’ shelter afforded, 1307 Total value of property imperiled, $6,293,658 Total value of property saved, 4,514,756 Total value of property lost, 1,742,902

Included in this report are the fourteen lives lost on the Italian bark Giovanni near Provincetown, Cape Cod, in a storm unprecedented for its terrors.  A story found its way into the papers at the time that the powder used in the mortar was damp, and that from this trifling neglect help could not be extended from the station.  A strict investigation was made, and it was proved by the testimony of the people in Provincetown that all the apparatus was in perfect order and the keepers and surfmen exerted themselves heroically in aid of the doomed vessel, but that she was stranded so far from shore that it was simply impossible to reach her.  In another case, that of the Vicksburg, wrecked on the Long Island coast, where a life was lost through the remissness of the keeper, the whole force of the station was discharged, and the order to that effect read to every crew in the service.