The Mexico had been bound from Liverpool to Guayaquil when the storm drove her onto the sandbanks near Southport on the evening of 9 December 1886. Distress signals brought the Eliza Fernley out from Southport. Her crew rowed into heavy seas, reached the Mexico, and were struck by a wave that capsized the boat. Two hours later, the upturned hull was found three miles away at Birkdale. The two survivors, Henry Robinson and John Jackson, had been trapped beneath the overturned boat, freed themselves, swum out, and clung to the keel before walking miles home to raise the alarm. One of them had tried to pull other crewmen from under the hull and failed. Four others initially survived the capsize but could not be saved.

Between fifteen and twenty minutes after the Southport boat launched, the St Anne's lifeboat Laura Janet was also called out. Her crew rowed five hundred yards, hoisted sail, and headed two miles offshore. What happened next was never established. Two red lights were seen from Southport -- possibly distress signals from the lifeboat. Then silence. Patrick Howarth, the RNLI historian, wrote: 'All that is known is that at quarter past eleven the next morning the life-boat was found ashore, bottom up, with three dead bodies hanging on the thwarts with their heads downwards. Every man in the crew was lost.' Thirteen men, gone into the dark Irish Sea with no witness to their final moments.

While two crews perished, a third completed one of the most remarkable rescues in lifeboat history. The Lytham lifeboat Charles Biggs -- never before deployed on a rescue -- rowed a mile and a half through the River Ribble, then out to the Mexico. By that time the barque had settled on her beam ends, and her crew had lashed themselves to the rigging. The Lytham men rowed alongside, shattered three oars in the process, and were swamped with water repeatedly, but pulled all twelve German sailors to safety. It was a triumph born of the same courage that had killed 27 of their fellow lifeboatmen that night.

The bodies of the drowned were laid out in the coaching house of the Birkdale Palace Hotel. That building later became a pub called The Fishermen's Rest, and is said to be haunted. The disaster -- the worst in the history of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution -- left sixteen widows and fifty fatherless children. Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm I both sent condolences. A public fund raised 30,000 pounds, an enormous sum for the era. Memorials went up on the promenade at St Anne's, in Southport Cemetery, and in the churchyard of St Cuthbert's Church in Lytham. Sir Charles Macara's organization of street collections in Manchester in 1891, inspired by the disaster, led to the creation of the first flag days -- a form of charitable fundraising that endures. In 1925, the RNLI withdrew its service from Southport, but local families eventually raised funds to establish an independent rescue trust, ensuring the tradition of service begun by the men of the Eliza Fernley would not die with them.