The wind rapidly increased to a gale, when the vessel had reached a point two miles north of Highland Light the wind suddenly changed to north and in a short time became a howling gale; the fast falling snow hid all the lights and the surrounding sea from view, and the temperature dropped to zero. In trying to make an off shore tack the vessel was struck by a huge wave, forced shoreward and with an awful plunge the schooner struck a bar a fourth of a mile from shore. It was now nearly midnight; the sea, though running fierce and wild, had not at this time reached monstrous size, and Captain Amesbury, thinking that his only hope for life depended upon getting away from the schooner, decided to make an attempt to launch the ship’s boat. After great exertion upon the part of himself and crew they succeeded in getting the boat over the vessel’s side, and the crew of six men and himself jumped in and cast off the line that held them to the vessel, but not two strokes of the oars had been taken when the cockleshell, borne like a chip on the top of an onrushing wave, was thrown bottom up and her crew were struggling in the icy waters. Captain Amesbury and one of his men were carried on a towering wave rapidly towards the shore, but before they could gain a foothold the remorseless undertow had drawn them back into the swirling waters. With the next oncoming wave the sailor was thrown shoreward again and succeeded in grasping a piece of wreckage and by its aid managed to crawl away from the jaws of death; not so fortunate the captain, who with the other members of his crew were swept away in the freezing sea and seen no more. The sailor, finding himself safe beyond the reach of the mad sea on the sand-swept and desolate shore, started to find shelter. In his struggles to reach the shore one of his boots had been torn off and lost, he was coatless, without covering on his head, thoroughly drenched, his clothes freezing to his benumbed body and limbs. In the blinding snow storm which had now set in in dead earnest with a cold so intense that it nearly took his breath away, this poor fellow started out to find if possible some human habitation; he could make no progress against the freezing gale so was obliged to turn towards the south and follow the direction of the wind. Over frozen fields, through brush and brambles that tore his bare foot at every step, over the ever increasing snow drifts, through bogs and meadows and hills and hollows, he struggled until the coming of daylight; then a farmer going out to his stable in the early morning found this unfortunate, frozen and exhausted sailor standing in the highway a short distance from the Highland House, so dazed by his terrible night of torture that he could not speak or move. He was carried into the farm house and the writer was one of those who helped to revive him. We were finally made to understand that he had come from a shipwreck on the coast and that all of his shipmates were drowned.