"7. I am sending you under separate cover a copy of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, also copies of Revenue-Cutter Service Bulletins Nos. 1, 3, and 5, covering reports of ice patrol for the years 1913, 1914, and 1915, respectively. The report of the ice patrol for 1916 has not yet been published. "Respectfully, "(Signed) E.P. Bertholf, "_Commodore Commandant_." LOST LINERS. About forty years ago the fine British barque _David G. Worth_, commanded by Capt. Thomas Williams, and owned by the writer, James Sprunt, sailed from Wilmington, N.C., with a full cargo of naval stores bound for the United Kingdom. The owner had spent $10,000 for extensive repairs in London on the previous voyage, and the ship was in every respect staunch and strong and classed A1 Lloyd's and 3/3 II French Veritas. The captain's wife accompanied him, and the crew numbered sixteen. From the day of her departure from Wilmington bound to Bristol up to the present time, not a word, not a sign of her, has ever come to light. As Mr. Joseph Horner said in _Lost Liners_: "We only know she sailed away "And ne'er was seen or heard of more." "Lost absolutely, in the fullest and most awful sense of the term! Swallowed up wholly, mysteriously, by the devouring sea! Such has been the fate of many gallant ships; no single survivor to tell the story; no boat or piece of wreckage, no bottle, not a sign or syllable from the vasty deep to reveal the nature of the awful catastrophe by which vessel, cargo, crew, and passengers were blotted out of existence! There is a weirdness, an awful terror, in such mysterious disappearances. They fill the imagination with horror, and cause mental tension in the minds of relatives of the lost far harder to bear than when the fate of a wrecked vessel is told by survivors. The sinking of the _Royal Charter_, or of the _London_, or of the _Northfleet_, though gruesome and harrowing, does not produce in the mind that sense of pain which comes with the recollection of the fate of the _President_, or of the _Pacific_, or of the _City of Boston_." Continuing, Mr. Horner in _Chambers's Journal_ says: "The number of vessels which have so mysteriously disappeared at sea that not a trace of them or of their crew or passengers has ever been found is larger than most people imagine. In the North Atlantic service alone, from the year 1841, when the _President_ disappeared with 136 souls, to 1890, when the _Thanemore_ of the Johnston Line, with 43 lives, never came to port, there have been, inclusive of these, no fewer than 24 big steamers absolutely and completely blotted out of human knowledge, together with their crews and passengers, numbering in all 1,453. At a very moderate estimate, the value of these vessels with their cargoes could not have been less than £5,000,000. The sum of human agony involved is terrible to contemplate. And every year vessels are posted up as missing.