Corvette ARIEL, carrying military stores to the US, in a storm October 1780 which dismasted her. Her survival considered miraculous as few ships made it through and the coastlines were littered with the wreckage of hundreds of ships. John Paul Jones writes:”.. till the night of the 7th, I did not fully conceive the awful majesty of the tempest and of shipwreck. I can give you no just idea of the tremendous scene that nature then presented, which surpassed the reach even of poetic fancy or the pencil.