FIGHTING FOR LIFE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVII, Issue 24, 27 January 1906, Page 13

FIGHTING FOR LIFE.

HEROISM OF NEWFOUNDLAND FISH* EES. - The professional "faster" who joes without food for four or five weeks, who fully watched and tended, and whose progress is chronicled by the caily papers, is but a trifler in the experience of starvation compared with, the castaway fishermen ot the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. These men have had adventures that make the performances of Dr. Tanner read like child's play.

It seems almost incderible that a scantily clad man could live for 29 days on a barren rock without food or drink, blistered by the hot sun in the day time and benumbed by the night's cold. Yet a Newfoundland fisherman went through such an ordeal, and lives to tell the tale. In 1904 two trawlers remained adrift for eleven days, with only a small jug of water to afford them subsistence. When found they were lying insensible on the bottom of the boat.

Terrible as the sufferings of these fishermen are in summer, they are far outclassed by the miseries of those who go astray In winter. Two fishermen were caught in a midwinter snowstorm one hundred miles off Newfundland a few years

aco. They lost sight of their vessel in the blizzard, and tried to row to land, one toiling at the oars while the other bailed out the boat.

When night came they made a drag or sea anchor of trawl tegs. While thus engaged Blackburn's mittens were washed overboard, and with naked hands his plight was desperate. But he gallantly held on. The nest day ps comrade collapsed, aad the third morning froze to death. Blackburn, taking the mitts and socks from the dead man, tried to cover his own hands, which were now positively frozen, into the shape of the grip of the oars, so that he could not straighten them.

Days passed, and he. toiled on. without food or drink. On the evening of the:fifth, day he reached the coast, and moored his boat at a deserted fishing wharf.

His Tvork was not over, for he had promised to give his. companion a burial on shore. •

Satisfying his thirst by eating fresh snow, Blackburn lay on a heap of nets all night, the agony of his hands preventing sleep- The next morning he found that .the boat had sunk with the body still in .it. With great difficulty he hanled. tJie boat on the rocks, and got the body upon, the wharf above. Then getting into the boat once more, he rowed all day. seeking sign* of human beings. At nightfall he came upon a little settlement, but would not accept the proffered hospitality until soma of the men had set out to bury his dead companion. A3 for himself, he lost all his fingere and toes. : Yet this man has since won fame as a daring mariner, having twice crossed the Atlantic alone in a Email boat, besides making a cruise of tbe seaboard from 803----i ton to New Orleans without uy companion*