On the 17th October, 1869, during a violent gale from the N., a small ship drifted past this place with signals of distress flying. The life- boat Birmingham was at once dispatched , to the aid of the vessel, which ultimately struck on the sands off Huttoft. The sea was very rough, but the boat was happily the means of saving all the shipwrecked persons, consisting of the crew of 2 men and a boy, and the master's wife and 2 children, all of whom were safely landed and taken up to the village inn. As the tide rose the ship began to break up, and in a few hours Was strewed in fragments along the beach. She Was the billyboy Swan, of Hull, bound from Boston to Gainsborough with a cargo of wheat.

The life-boat behaved extremely well in the heavy seas which she had to encounter.