The fishing schooner Elsia G. Silva of Gloucester, coming in from a fishing trip to the South Shoals, off Nantucket, on the afternoon of February 14th, 1927, encountered a strong wind with fog when nearing Chatham Bars. This condition grew constantly worse and the storm increased until it reached gale force, driving a high sea over the outlying bars, and the thick mist obscured the shore of the entire coast. The dense fog enveloped everything except the wildly rushing sea, and before daylight the following morning the little schooner was borne high upon the crest of the great white-capped waves, only the next moment to be dashed into the deep hollows of the gale-swept sea as it rushed onward towards the beach. Her crew of sixteen men, with much difficulty and danger, clung to the rigging of the tossing vessel. The Coast Guardsmen from Cahoons Hollow Station promptly reached the vicinity of the wave-swept boat, which soon stranded on the beach one mile north of the station. They could render no help to the crew of the Silva by means of boats or gear, and could only stand by to pull the men from the surf as they were washed from her decks. One by one the fishermen’s crew were pulled from the surf until the entire sixteen were safely brought out of the surf that tore across the doomed craft’s deck. Soon the fury of the sea tore the vessel to pieces, carrying away her deckhouses and all movable things from her deck. Soon the masts fell with a crash into the sea, and sails, rigging and spars mixed in a jumble of wreckage, and then was scattered along the sands of the beach. The boat was carrying a fair catch of fish, all of which was mixed with the wreckage and scattered in the sea. Soon the men from the village came to the beach and gathered up such material as had not already been swept far down the coast, and a few days later only a protruding bit of broken spar or a bit of rope dangling from some buried anchor marked the spot where the Elsia stranded. This again was another fortunate escape of the crew from the deck of a wrecked vessel; only a little difference in the conditions might have sent sixteen men to untimely deaths. A TERRIBLE DISASTER For several years the Pacific Mail Steamship Company has been operating a fleet of several large ocean liners, each bearing the name of a President of the United States. These ships had been making around the world trips, and in 1927 one of these ships, the Presidente Wilson, was under charter to the Cosulich Line, an Italian company. In the autumn of 1927, the Presidente Wilson was returning from an all around the world trip, with a large passenger list and tons of freight from Europe and the Far East, to Boston. She had left Seattle quite a number of days before, passed through the Panama Canal, touched at New York and on to Boston, which would end the trip.