On the morning of Feb. 17, 1914, five members of the Italian bark Castagna met a tragic end on the sandbars just south of the Marconi Wireless Station in Wellfleet. Eight crew members would eventually be rescued by the Coast Guard, while four bodies were recovered within hours or days of the wreck. However, it was much longer before the body of the ship’s master, Captain Guissepe Garva, was found.

Garva, who was swept off the ice-covered deck of the ship by a huge wave shortly after the Castagna struck the bar, would not be found until 20 months later — in Orleans. Garva’s body was discovered by Walter Moulton of Milton on Sandy Flats in Nauset Harbor, on Oct. 15, 1915. “The captain’s body was ... washing out of the sands, still encased in ice,” Orleans historian Al Snow wrote in The Cape Codder in 1966. “It had floated ashore, became buried in the sand and seaweed, and was well preserved.”