The rocking of the ship by the waves and the storms that beat over her on the sand and coarse gravel of the bed of the sea had worn holes through her iron sides where her masts were stepped into her keel, and immediately the ship rose from the bottom a great torrent of water poured in through these openings, flooded the entire ship again and carried her back into the sandy bed where she had so long reposed. For many years in the ever changing sands the jagged sides of her ever diminishing hull would be exposed only to be buried by the next great storm that swept her. LOSS OF THE GIOVANNI A northeast gale and furious snow storm was sweeping the coast of Cape Cod and hiding the great sea in its smother all through the day of March 4th, 1875. Late in the afternoon, during a momentary breaking away of the storm filled clouds, a great vessel was discovered fast upon the outer sand bar nearly three miles north of Highland Life Saving Station. It proved to be the Italian bark Giovanni, Captain Ferri, from Palermo for Boston, with a cargo of sumac, nuts and brimstone; her sails were blown away, her rudder broken. She was in a position to be pounded to pieces before another sunrise; her crew was almost helpless from exposure to the cold storm. The crews of Life Saving Stations 6 and 7 were promptly at the scene of the wreck, but owing to the snow bound conditions of the roads and the almost impassable state of the beach, added to the great distance from the Life Saving Stations, it was a task almost beyond the power of human endurance to get their boats and beach apparatus to the shore opposite the scene of the disaster, but as soon as the position of the vessel was clearly determined, and it was recognized what kind of gear was necessary in order to aid the men in the ship, they hurried to their stations, and after hours of almost superhuman exertions, dragging their beach carts, mortar guns and apparatus through heavy snow drifts that had to be broken out before they could proceed. Over sand hills swept bare by the driving gale, through meadow bogs and brush covered ridges, they finally reached the beach in the vicinity of the wreck. No attempt was made to launch the life boat, as such an effort, in the face of all the terrible conditions that prevailed, the awful sea and the distance of the vessel from shore, would have been foolhardy in the extreme, and would only have added to the death roll the lives of the life-savers, without accomplishing the saving of a single life.