s on the Pacific coast are not yet
built, but it is hoped that all will be finished and in working
order by the fall of 1876. The United States will then offer to the
shipwrecked voyager security and protection through her vast extent of
coast such as is afforded by no other nation. The measures promoting
this end were carried through Congress by Senators Newell, Stockton,
Hamlin, Boutwell, Chandler and Frelinghuysen, and Representatives
Lynch, Hale of Maine, Cox, Hooper and Conger. But the actual credit of
this great national work of humanity is due to Sumner I. Kimball, who
not only conceived the idea of the complete guarding of the coast and
prepared the bill for Congress, but has reorganized the entire
system and carried it out successfully in all of its minute practical
details.

The work accomplished by the service may be clearly understood by a
glance at the following figures. There is no record of the loss of
life on stranded vessels previous to its formation in 1848. There
remain only the terrible legends, such as those which the captain and
Jacob told us, of numbers of emigrant ships and steamers yearly going
down with three to four hundred souls on board. The coasts of Long
Island and New Jersey have justly been called "the despair of mariners
and shipowners." During the first twenty years of the operation of the
service, despite its mismanagement, the number of lives lost yearly
was reduced to an average of twenty-five. Since 1871 the period of its
reorganization, the loss of life on the coasts of New Jersey and
Long Island has averaged but one per annum. The report for these four
years, inclusive of the whole coast guarded by stations, is--

Total number of disasters, 185
Total number of lives imperiled, 2583
Total number of lives saved, 2564
Total number of lives lost, 19
Total number of shipwrecked persons sheltered
at the stations, 368
Total number of days' shelter afforded, 1307
Total value of property imperiled, $6,293,658
Total value of property saved, 4,514,756
Total value of property lost, 1,742,902

Included in this report are the fourteen lives lost on the Italian
bark Giovanni near Provincetown, Cape Cod, in a storm unprecedented
for its terrors. A story found its way into the papers at the time
that the powder used in the mortar was damp, and that fr