It has been three-score years since the wreck of the Minturn, but in every year since then there has been numbered among the members of the Sandy Hook Pilot's Association scores of hardy men, who, should need come to them, stood ready to risk their lives and die as bravely as did Thomas Freeborn. Pilot Henry Devere proved that he had the same heroic fiber in his makeup when he sailed in the James Funck, before the Civil War. A brig under shortened sails was sighted one day, and when the yawl of the pilot-boat drew alongside, Devere hailed a boy at the wheel. The boy seemed to be stupefied, and the pilot was obliged to hail him several times before he started up, leaned forward into the companionway, and called feebly to somebody below. Then a gaunt man came on deck and said that the crew had been stricken by fever. Most people in the face of a menace of this sort would have turned back, but Devere was not that kind of man. Instead, he went on board, and, with the help of the mate, headed the vessel toward Sandy Hook. The captain was ill in his stateroom. The body of a dead sailor found on deck was tied in mosquito netting and dropped overboard. The boy died in the lower bay, and the captain off the Battery, leaving the mate as the sole survivor of the crew. The pilot helped to furl the sails and make the lines fast, and only left the stricken vessel when she had reached her moorings. The stranding of the Jesse Carll in 1889, illustrates another of the dangers with which pilots sometimes have to contend. The boat, having discharged one of her five pilots, was standing off shore near Fire Island, when she began to feel the force of an advancing southern cyclone, and early in the evening was in what sailors call "nasty weather." At midnight a violent thunder-storm burst overhead, and the increasing wind raised a furious sea, but Pilot Gideon Mapes, in charge of the vessel, had her under double-reefed sails, and standing up against the wind and waves in fine shape. Then came a deluge of rain, and the wind increased to hurricane force. Soon a thick mist covered the water and shut out everything in sight. The boat reached off and on, expecting to keep out of shoal water, but all efforts failed. Her signals of distress were seen by the life-saving crew on the beach, and before daylight the ten men on board were taken ashore in boats. When morning came an effort was made to pull the boat off, but as she shifted into deeper water she filled, a hole having been made in her bottom. Then the pilots abandoned her, but she was raised and repaired a few weeks later.