Indeed, under the new system of pilotage, battles with cross-seas and gales and exposures to snow, cold and sleet, while cruising for vessels hundreds of miles off coast, are fast becoming things of the past, and for stories of collisions, wrecks, narrow escapes and strange mishaps, one must now hark back to the records of former days. Here, however, he is sure to encounter many a tale that quickens the pulse and stirs the blood. Take the case of the Columbia, run down by the steamship Alaska, off Fire Island. When the Alaska was sighted, the pilot-boat was head-reaching to the north on the port tack. The wind was blowing a gale from the northwest, and an ugly sea was running, with the weather clear, but cold. She plunged deeply into the heavy sea, and heeled to the force of the wind until her lee rail was awash. The wind whipped off the top of the waves and filled the air with spray. When the steamship sighted the boat off Fire Island, her course was changed to make a lee for the boat's yawl. She seemed to stop when the yawl was launched and two men and a pilot went over the side of the boat and dropped into her, but ere the yawl had fairly started on her way the liner, of a sudden, and without warning, forged ahead. The surge from the port bow of the Alaska, as she pitched into a big wave, capsized the boat, and threw the men into the water. Before anything could be done to save them the bows of the steamship rose and fell again, and, hitting the pilot-boat, cut it in two and crushed the decks and beams to bits, the broken timbers being swept under the bows and along the sides as the steamship again forged ahead and passed over the spot. Not a man on the Columbia was saved. The Sandy Hook pilot, however, never quails in the face of danger or even death, as was proved at the stranding of the packet boat, John Minturn, almost within a stone's throw of the New Jersey beach during a frightful hurricane in February, 1846. There were fifty-one souls on board the Minturn, and of that number only thirteen escaped to tell the story of that fearful night. Its hero, according to the evidences of all, was Pilot Thomas Freeborn, who to the very last struggled manfully to succor the hapless women and children who clung to the deck around him. It was bitter cold, and every wave that washed over the stranded ship left its coating of ice on deck, rigging, passengers and crew. Freeborn and brave Captain Stark, who was forced to see his wife and children freeze to death without being able to render them assistance, gave up their own clothing in a vain attempt to protect the weaker sufferers, and when days afterward the pilot's body was found washed up on the beach it was almost naked, while that of a woman, which lay near-by, was carefully wrapped in his pea-jacket.