A Lecture, Or Essay On the most efficacious means of Preserving The Lives Of Shipwrecked Sailors And The Shipwreck

8 when some hundreds of lives have shared the same fate in one gale. In the memorable New Year’s storm of 1779, I have had it related to me by those who witnessed the fact, that forty-one vessels were wrecked on the sands near Yarmouth, and almost all on board perished. Many other old inhabitants of that part of the coast have likewise testified to me, from their own recollection, and from what had been handed to them by general tradition, that never, from the earliest period of navigation, had a single winter passed without exhi- biting the appalling havoc of storm in a great loss of lives from stranded vessels, previous to the production of the plan that arose from the following circumstances. During four winters after my appointment to the charge of the Barracks at Yarmouth in 1803, I resided near the beach, and was witness each year to the loss of vessels and their crews while within a few yards of the shore and safety. But in the dreadful gale of Fe- bruary 18, 1807, I beheld, when his Majesty’s gun-brig Snipe was stranded, no less than sixty-seven persons perish, within fifty yards of the shore, from the impossibility of getting any communication by a rope or line with the vessel, though every attempt was made for seve- ral hours to rescue them by the methods then in use, and Mr. Winn’s was among those tried. On the close of that mournful event, I vowed, if Providence spared my life, I would apply myself to discover some means by which not only the sufferers might have been rescued, but simi- lar occurrences prevented in future. Many months produced uniform disappointment in my attempts; all the inodes by which a rope might possibly be conveyed from the distressed vessel to the shore were tried, and all were rejected, on finding that nothing, having a line to it, however buoyant, would come to the beach, from the sweep of the sea taking the bite or stack of the Jine. I then entertained the idea of casting a weight, with a line attached to it, from the shore to the vessel, either by mechanical force, or that of gunpowder, and I attempted the projecting of a shot with a chain from a carronade ; but finding chains invariably to break from the want of a proper and imme- diate connecting medium, and that stout rope, although saturated in antiphlogistic substances, was consumed, and thus defeated my efforts in innumerable experiments, I began to despair of success. At last, procuring a piece of ordnance (a royal mortar) better adapted to the purpose, I bit upon an incombustible medium of connexion