IN PERIL OF THE SEA

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 246, 18 October 1927, Page 6

IN PERIL OF THE SEA

Flights over long stretches or sea, such as the Atlantic and Hawaiian "hops," which have claimed so many victims in the last few months, should, says the man in the street, be stopped in the interests of the airmen themselves. What good purpose, it is asked, is served by repeating a success already attained, when the penalty of failure is death? There is sound common sense at the back of this argument, but the adventurous are seldom guided by the principles of that uncommon attribute. And a very similar efflorescence of daring arousing just such a measure of popular enthusiasm carries us back over five centuries. Then it was in the sea that the risks were taken —now it is in the air above the oceans—but the spirit is the same, and the voyagers, then, as now, headed for the unknown at the mercy of wind and storm.

The men who are now financing and making possible such flights as those of Hawker and Alcock, Lindbergh and Byrd, had their prototype in Prince Henry the Navigator, the first ministering angel of the sea, who fitted out the expeditions of 1419 which discovered the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands, and whose knowledge of navigation eventually made possible the estimation of the declination of the sun, and with it began to make navigation an exact science.

Not immediately did the race of sea-giants come into being, but Columbus, Vasco di Gama and John Cabul opened up the long sea lanes for the venturous mariners of a century later, who, sailing from the ports of Britain in little cockleshells that would hardly be thought safe for a run to Kawau nowadays, scoured the seas of the world. Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Frobisher and scores of others sailed out into the blue, and returned to tell stories which thrilled the ports of their birth with pride. Ships of Britain were found in all the seven seas, following in the wake of Drake across the Pacific, breaking a way through the ice in search of the north-west passage, slave dealing on the African coast, and running their terrible cargoes across the Atlantic, setting out in caravans in search of Prester John's kingdom in far Cathay, over-running Russia and Turkestan, buying cargoes of apes and ivory in Gadire, crossing to India by seaWithout newspapers to tell the story of their voyages, their exploits must nevertheless have much of the enthusiasm which marked the return of Alan Cobham from his Australian flight, the arrival of Lindbergh and Chamberlain in Europe.

We have some guide to the interest evoked by the great voyages of the Elizabethan age in the works of Shakespeare. "The Tempest," for instance, has as a basis for its phantasy the wreck of a Devon navigator, Sir George Somers, on the Bermudas, one of the thousands who never came back, and in all probability the proportion of losses was just as great as it is today among the airmen. For the cranky little ships were just as much the sport of the elements, and of chance, as were the 'planes of Nungesser and Coli, or the Princess Lowenstein Wertheim. The law of storms, now known to every navigator, was still a sealed book in that day, and Shakespeare probably expressed the average landsman's viewpoint when he makes the king's son Ferdinand, in the middle of the storm, cry "with hair upstaring, 'Hell is emptv, and all the devils are here.'" —VOYAGEUR.