To a very considerable degree the life-saving service of the United States is an outgrowth of the revenue marine.  To sojourners by the waterside, on the shores of either ocean or lake, the trim little life-saving stations are a familiar sight, and summer pleasure-seekers are entertained with the exhibition drills of the crews in the surf.  It is the holiday side of this service as a rule that the people chiefly know, but its records show how far from being all holiday pleasure it is.  In 1901 the men of the life-saving corps were called to give aid to 377 wrecked ships.  Of property in jeopardy valued at $7,354,000, they saved $6,405,035 worth.  Of 93,792 human beings in peril of death in the waters, all save 979 were saved.  These are the figures relating only to considerable shipwrecks, but as life-saving stations are established at nearly every harbor’s mouth, and are plentiful about the pleasure cruising grounds of yachts and small sailboats, hundreds of lives are annually saved by the crews in ways that attract little attention.  In 1901 the records show 117 such rescues.

The idea of the life-saving service originated with a distinguished citizen of New Jersey, a State whose sandy coast has been the scene of hundreds of fatal shipwrecks.  In the summer of 1839 William A. Newell, a young citizen of that State, destined later to be its Governor, stood on the beach near Barnegat in a raging tempest, and watched the Austrian brig “Count Perasto” drift onto the shoals.  Three hundred yards from shore she struck, and lay helpless with the breakers foaming over her.  The crew clung to the rigging for a time, but at last, fearing that she was about to go to pieces, flung themselves into the raging sea, and strove to swim ashore.  All were drowned, and when the storm went down, the dead bodies of thirteen sailors lay strewn along the beach, while the ship itself was stranded high and dry, but practically unhurt, far above the water line.

“The bow of the brig being elevated and close to the shore after the storm had ceased,” wrote Mr. Newell, in describing the event long years after, “the idea was forced quickly upon my mind that those unfortunate sailors might have been saved if a line could have been thrown to them across the fatal chasm.  It was only a short distance to the bar, and they could have been hauled ashore in their small boat through, or in, the surf....  I instituted experiments by throwing light lines with bows and arrows, by rockets, and by a shortened blunderbuss with ball and line.  My idea culminated in complete success, however, by the use of a mortar, or a carronade, and a ball and line.  Then I found, to my great delight, that it was an easy matter to carry out my desired purpose.”