The Russian freighter Lamut, bound for Vladivostok from Puget Sound, was caught in a violent storm off the Washington coast, lost her bearings and on March 31 crashed into the towering offshore rocks south of Cape Flattery known as Quillayute Needles. The unfortunate Russian crew of 44 men and eight women found themselves in much the same deadly predicament as the victims of the Valencia disaster. To seaward, crashing seas formed a maelstrom among the wicked offshore rocks. On the landward side a sheer cliff towered above them. Coast Guardsmen, finding it impossible to approach the wreck from the sea, blazed a trail through two miles of tangled rain forest to reach the cliff above the stranded ship, which lay on her beam ends in the breakers. Having no suitable rescue gear, they tied their shoelaces together, forming a feeble line which was dropped over the cliff to the deck of the Lamut. The Russian crew made a heavier line fast and this was pulled up to the cliff top. Unwilling to attempt the precipitous lift up the cliff, the Russians attempted to launch a lifeboat, but one of the women crew members was killed and another injured when a boat-fall broke, upending the craft in the sea. All hands, including the surviving women, were then hauled by the rescue party up the vertical lifeline. Surprisingly, every one of them made it, literally cheating death in a rescue operation which can be described as a bona fide "cliff -hanger". As an interesting sidelight on the loss of the Lamut, it should be noted that numerous American marine men and others associated with the case wrote personal letters to Premier Stalin explaining the hazards of the Cape Flattery area and asking that he not punish the master of the wrecked vessel. It is said that these appeals saved the life of the captain upon his return to Russia, capital punishment being the common fate of Russian masters of that period who lost their vessels. Two other Russian vessels stranded near Akutan, Alaska, the Kokhonsnik on October 11, and the Odessa on October 16, but both were refloated by the U. S. Coast Guard cutters Clover and Citrus. Newell