“Our vessel was the British ship Jason, Capt. McMillan. We were on a voyage from the East Indies to Boston with jute bales. We did not know our position until we saw the land at four this afternoon. We tried, by crowding every sail upon the ship, to weather Cape Cod; we failed. There were 27 officers and men in our ship’s company. I am the only one that lives; I saw all my shipmates perish when the mizzenmast fell.” [Illustration: WRECK OF THE JASON] Like many another shipwreck the irony of fate pursued this ship’s company, when her keel was driven into the sand bar by the force of the mighty waves which hurled her forward, the only spot upon the whole ship which seemed to offer a place of refuge from the boiling surf which tore across her deck was the mizzenmast. Into the rigging of this spar every man hurried except the one man who was saved. He was swept from the rail before he could gain a foothold with his shipmates; but what they had hoped would be their haven of safety was their doom. Scarcely had they climbed above the maelstrom of rushing waters when the mast went down with a crash into the sea, killing many of the sailors in its fall and drowning the others in the wreckage. The foremast stood unmoved by the winter’s storms for many weeks. Could this unfortunate crew have reached this portion of the ship many of them would have been rescued on the following day. Out there today when the tide is low, protruding through the sands of the bar and the white caps that wash them, are the broken fragments of the sunken ship looking like tombstones in the village churchyard. All along the shores of this wind swept and sea washed coast those half submerged and silent sentinels remind us that up and down this sandy reach the ever moving sea has covered hundreds of those heroic men who have gone down in ships on the great sea. LOSS OF THE STEAMSHIP PORTLAND Among all the terrible disasters which have made the dreaded shores of Cape Cod known to mariners the world over, probably the worst of all was the loss of the steamer Portland, which sailed from her pier in Boston, on the evening of November 26th, 1898, on one of her regular trips to Portland, Maine, and before midnight of the following day her broken timbers, cabin fittings, large quantities of cargo and dead bodies lined the outer shores of Cape Cod, from Highland Light to Chatham. Not a person of her 175 passengers and crew survived the disaster. The awful hurricane which swept the coast of New England that fateful Saturday night and Sunday was the worst in the memory of living men; the wind attained a velocity of approximately one hundred miles an hour.