The Cap Lopez was already an old ship by 1907. She had been built in 1885 at H. Hespe's yard in Brake, in Lower Saxony, for the Bremen-area firm Rabien and Stadtlander, and christened Rheinland. Seven hundred and fifty-eight gross register tons of iron and steam. In 1905 a French-Belgian operator, the Société Anonyme du SS Cap Lopez, bought her and gave her the name of a cape on the African coast - the place in what is now Gabon where the Equator very nearly meets the sea. In 1907 she changed hands again, sold to the Société Anonyme de Navigation Mercure in Antwerp. On her last voyage she was running iron ore and salt out of Mazarrón on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, bound for the Belgian port that now owned her. She never finished the trip.

G. B. Bayley, a Deal boatman, remembered later that the wind was blowing hard W.S.W. and the sea was running correspondingly heavy. The Kingsdown lifeboat Charles Hargrave was launched at 2:30 AM, an hour and a half after midnight, in answer to rockets fired from the dark water southeast of the shore. When she reached the wreck the Cap Lopez was already fast aground on the South Goodwins. Her captain begged the Kingsdown coxswain to do his best to save her. The Walmer lifeboat came up shortly afterwards. In the usual procedure for such cases, men from each boat boarded the wreck to lay an anchor and begin throwing cargo overboard - lightening her in the hope that the rising tide might lift her clear before the sand and the breakers broke her back. The weather refused to let it work. The wind rose. The flood tide came hard. Seas began making a clean breach over the deck.

Then a great towering sea took the Walmer lifeboat. The rope connecting her to the Cap Lopez parted. Her rudder and her steering gear smashed. About half her crew were still aboard the wreck. The disabled boat was carried far downwind, helpless. Everything now fell to the Kingsdown men. To get close enough to take off the stranded crew and the marooned Walmer boatmen, the Charles Hargrave had to come in alongside in seas that were lifting her clear above the wreck and dropping her back. On one such drop she struck a piece of the ship's upper structure and was nearly destroyed - the men aboard said afterwards that the escape was miraculous. By now the seas were sweeping the Cap Lopez so completely that many of the men aboard had climbed into the rigging. They jumped from the ropes to the lifeboat each time she rose alongside, timing each leap to the swell. Twenty men came off that way - the Cap Lopez's crew, the boarded Walmer boatmen - and the ship's dog. Not one was lost.

The Kingsdown crew, with a boat full of half-drowned men and a wreck behind them, went next for the disabled Walmer lifeboat that was somewhere downwind. They found her, took her in tow, and discovered they had themselves been blown so far to leeward that returning to Deal was no longer the safe choice. They steered for Ramsgate instead, and reached the Royal Harbour around noon on the 22nd. The crew of the Cap Lopez and the two lifeboat crews - all of them, in the words of the report, thoroughly exhausted - were cared for at the Sailors' Home. The lifeboats were towed back to their stations by the harbour tug the next day. The names of the men who rowed that night belong on the record: James Pay acted as coxswain for Kingsdown, with William Sutton, J. Birch, John Bingham, Edward Arnold, A. Sutton, J. Kingsford, T. Bingham, John Arnold, Charles Arnold, W. Laming, James Bingham, and Edward Bingham at the oars. The Walmer crew - T. Heard, H. Parker, R. Mercer, J. Mercer, W. Pearson, H. Pearson, B. Pearson, T. Lewis, G. Norris, W. Baily, J. Bullen, T. Bullen, E. Jordan, B. Jordan, and T. Gardener - went home in the towed boat.

The Cap Lopez did not survive. Despite the boatmen's effort, the worsening gale and the rising tide made her a total loss; she joined the more than two thousand ships that the South Goodwins have taken in their long career as the ship-swallower of the English Channel. Her cargo of iron ore went down with her. The story of her wreck, though, became one of the standard demonstrations of what the Deal, Walmer, and Kingsdown boatmen could do in conditions that would have killed any less practiced crew. The lifeboats they manned - clinker-built, sail-and-oar, eventually replaced by motor boats - were the local end of a Royal National Lifeboat Institution tradition that the Kentish stations had effectively invented. Around them, that December night, the same sand kept on doing what it does: taking ships, occasionally giving the men back.