"POSTED MISSING."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 40, 16 February 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

"POSTED MISSING."

SHIPS THAT NEVER RETURNED

VANISHED FROM HUMAN KEN.

UNCANNY DISAPPEARANCES.

(By W. M. CAMPBELL.)

The tale of a shipwreck has for most i readers a fascination unequalled by any other of the many forms of tragedy which from time to time sweep some unlucky band or section of humanity into eternity, and during last century shipping disasters were all too frequent around our rugged and then little-known coast. But. these bygone tragedies on our shores have been chronicled, so that small room for speculation remains when the cold light of Marine Court inquiries have been shed on each recurring catastrophe. Far greater is the speculative interest in and the perennial curiosity regarding the undiscbverable end of the forty or fifty vessels which left our shores and were never J beard of more.

Our list begins.in 1865, when, in a storm off the coast of Canterbury, the Lady Franklin, the Mary Ann Avery and the Blue Bell evidently foundered. Two years later the well-laden barque Driver, from Newcastle to Port Chalmers, had the ominous entry, "No news," against her name in shipping registers. On a calm, sunny day, May 13, 1870, the trim little brig Matoaha sailed out from Lyttelton into oblivion. A worse disaster occurred in 1872, when the clipper ship Glenmark left the last-men-tioned port with a full cargo of wool, £80,000 worth of gold from the West Coast diggings, and fifty people, to vanish for ever from our ken. The Glenmark was one of the fastest vessels then trading to our shores, having made the trip from Gravesend to New Zealand in 83 days from port to port. Many immigrants whose descendants are still among us had been carried on this popular ship, but the log of that last voyage will never be completed, and no vestige of the beautiful vessel was ever picked up. Then in 1874 two barques, the Eleanor and the Comet, both plying across the Tasman, evidently left their bones far beneath the stormy surface of that lonely sea. Record of the "Eighties.

' The record continues in 1880, which year saw the unknown end of three vessels, the schooners Merlin and Poneke and the cutter Three Brothers. The following year two fine schooners, the Bee and the Dido, disappeared mysteriously, at sea. The year-1882 has three

I vessels, the schooners Edith, Jose-1 phine and the Richard and Mary, marked a fate unknown," but 1883 holds the terrible record of no fewer than six vessels, and from only one of these was any wreckage ever found. These six were the schooners Clarinda, Wild Wave and Wave of Life, the brigantine Adieu, and the two full-rigged ships Loch Fyne and Loch Dee. Like all the famous Loch line, each of the last two was well equipped and manned, both carried passengers as usual, and both left Lyttelton, the Loch Dee bound for Falmouth, leaving on March 3, and the Loch Fyne, bound for Ireland, on May 14. No news has ever been received of either ship. How far they sailed, whether they foundered in some typhoon, or struck some uncharted rock, can never be ascertained. There have been fires, mutinies and piracies at sea; nil we shall ever know is that with mariners, passengers and cargoes they have vanished somewhere in the vast ocean.

On June 10, 1884, a young captain and his bride set out from Port Chalmers for the South Seas in the trading schooner Tauranga. It would seem their fate was an unhappy one, let us hope not long impending. The mystery shrouding their honeymoon voyage would serve as the theme for a South Seas novel, but the truth concerning their great adventure will never be , known.

The barque Elizabeth should have made port in 1885, but she had to be marked in maritime records, along with the fore-and-after Malietoa as "missing." Some of the old hands who knew Auckland in 1887 may call to mind s.s. ketch Sir Donald, and the schooner Columbia. These vessels appear to have foundered not far from shore, but none of their wreckage was identified. ißgo A Disastrous Year.

After 1888, when the schooner Mimiha was posted missing, there comes a brief cessation of these uncanny disappearances, but the year 1890 was a most disastrous one. The probable cause of the disappearance of no less than live vessels within ten months was more than surmised at that year, when much polar ice had been reported near New Zealand. A block of ice as large as a house may sink a ship, yet, being just awash, its translucent bulk would elude any but the most vigilant lookoutman. One of these five ships, the barque Aisaye, left some wreckage on the Chathams, while some books from Sir Walter Buller's valuable library, which was on board, and some cases of curios from his collection were the only mementoes of the calamity which overtook the Assaye so near the end of her voyage. That same yeas the barques Kentish Lass and Dunedin, as well as the schooner Rainbow, found unknown graves, but the worst tragedy of the five was the disappearance of the stately clipper Marlborough. On January 29 she left Lyttdton (that fatal last, port

of call for the ships of those days), with 29 people on board, and an extremely valuable cargo. One of the finest ships of her class, her fate was for many years spoken of as "the Marlborough mystery." In this case, however, the mystery was explained years later, when from different sources came accounts that she had been found afloat in a deep indentation of the precipitous coast of Terra del Fuego. With timbers rotted and green, with ghostly yards a-creaking, with : bleached human skeletons about her decks, this water-logged derelict lay close inshore. More skeletons amidst the valves of seashells littered the near-by rocks, telling of the cruel fate from starvation and cold of those once jovial sailors who had sung their lusty chanteys to the accompaniment of the concertina or the clanking of the chain-links through the 'hawsepipe. Her end serves as an indication of that of the many unknown ones around Cape Horn. Toward the Century's Close.

During 1891 two barques, the Rose JVI. and the Habil, vanished utterly, and in the same year the s.s. Kakanui, sent to the Macquarie. Islands to take off some sealers, embarked eight men there, but neither the little steamer nor any of the nineteen men aboard were ever heard of more. The dreadful list of missing ships of last century concludes with the schooners Louie and Welcome Home, posted missing in '92; the schooner Maile, '93; the Crest of the Wave and the Dunedin, of '94; the ketch Comet, of '95; the Lizzie Ellen, of '97; the barque Fido, of '98, and the schooner Marmion, which left Napier during the last year of the century and evidently followed its half-hundred predecessors to the capacious locker of Davy Jones.

Fanciful travellers by sea or lonelv sailormen during the dark night-watch may hear the voices of those lost mariners in the breeze's whisper or in the seabirds' cry, but those last tragic voyages will ever remain weird mysteries of which we can but repeat:

Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Awav Far, far behind is all that they can sav."