In December of 1778, the Federal brig General Arnold, Magee master and twelve Barnstable men among the crew, drove ashore on the Plymouth flats during a furious nor’easter, the “Magee storm” that mariners, for years after, used as a date to reckon from. The vessel was shrouded in snow and ice, men froze to the rigging, others were smothered in the snow, a few were washed overboard; and when, after three days, succor came to them, only thirty-three men lived of the one hundred and five who had sailed from Boston so short a time before. Of the twelve Barnstable men only one survived. Bound in ice, he lay on deck as one dead: conscious, but powerless to move or speak. By one chance in a thousand, the rescuers caught his agonized gaze; they bore him ashore, nursed him back to life, and when he was able to travel sent him home over the snow-blocked roads in an ambulance improvised from a hammock slung between horses fore and aft. The Plymouth folk, unlike the looters of the Somerset—who, to be sure, looted only an enemy—not only buried the dead and sheltered the living, but guarded the property aboard the General Arnold for its owners. As for Barnstable, he lost both his feet from frost-bite, but could ride to church on the Sabbath as well as another. He busied himself about his garden in summer, and in winter coopered for his neighbors; with considerable skill, also, he cast many small articles in pewter and lead. In 1798, the “Salem Gazette” reports: “seven vessels ashore on Cape Cod, twenty-five bodies picked up and buried, probably no lives saved.” In 1802, there was another memorable wreck on the Peaked Hill Bar when three Salem vessels richly laden, one for Leghorn, two for Bordeaux, foundered there in a blinding storm. And, slow as the posts then were, not for nearly three weeks were full details of the loss received at Salem. For many years, every great snowstorm following a fine day in March would revive the story of “the three Salem ships.” During the Embargo War, a Truro man fitted out an old boat to trade with Boston, and on one such trip was overtaken at nightfall, below Minot’s Ledge, by a furious northeast snowstorm. It seemed probable that there would be one embargo-dodger the less to harry the revenue officers. The crew consisted of a solitary seaman noted for good judgment, his only oath milkmild. “Well, Mr. White, what would you do now?” inquired the skipper. “By gracious, sir,” returned White, all unperturbed, “I’d take in the mains’l, double reef the fores’l, and give her an offing.” Laconic direction for the one course that offered hope, and the event justified its wisdom. In 1815 a September gale that equalled Bradford’s Great Storm swept Buzzard’s Bay, piled the tides higher than had ever been known, and all but excavated a Cape Cod Canal. Trees were uprooted, salt-works destroyed, and vessels driven high on land. In 1831, to vary the story, unprecedented snows were fatal to deer in the Sandwich woods