Out of the entire company of passengers and crew which went down with the ship only 60 bodies were recovered. Some of those found were fully dressed with life preservers upon them, indicating that the wearers knew that their chances for life were slight indeed. Other bodies were entirely nude when recovered, showing that some of the passengers had evidently retired to their staterooms in the earlier hours of the voyage and were made so ill by the terrible pitching and rolling that they made no exertion to dress themselves before the ship went down. It is believed that no less than 500 human lives were the sea’s death toll in this awful hurricane that swept the shores of Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay in that frightful storm. This disaster will pass into the annals of Cape Cod’s shipwreck history as the one which concerned the greatest loss of life from a single vessel. The fury of such a gale can hardly be understood or appreciated by any one not having had personal experience with sea coast storms. As far as the eye could reach on that Sunday morning over the wild sea not the least bit of blue water could be seen for a distance of two miles from the shore; the whole ocean was a mass of seething foam; this driven shoreward by the gale would be caught from the beach by the wind and blown skyward high over the towering bluffs, then swept inland and break like bursting soap bubbles in the fields hundreds of yards away. [Illustration: x(  Where wreckage first landed from S.S. Portland Sunday night. P   Place five miles N. E. of High Head Life Saving Station, where it is thought by all coast men the Portland went down. ] Such was the force of this hurricane of wind that every window pane on the ocean side of our house (the Signal Station at Highland Light) was blown in and smashed into a thousand fragments. Men exposed to the full force of the storm were blown from their feet and hurled about like blocks of wood. Men of the Life Saving service were exhausted by their exertions in trying to cover their beats, and several of them were completely unnerved by their frequent trying experiences in dragging torn and sea-washed bodies from the surf. There were cases where some of the men of this service were made almost nervous wrecks by their almost nightly contact with the disfigured and unfortunate victims thrown up to their feet by the sea. Destruction widespread on land and sea was the result of this fearful storm. Never had its like been seen before. * * * * * My daughter for a number of years was my assistant and the following story, which originally appeared in the New York World, may be of interest in this connection: THE GIFT OF THE SEA _A true tale of Cape Cod, written for the New York World by Lillian May Small, only official woman marine observer in the United States._