SEA MYSTERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 88, 15 April 1933, Page 4 (Supplement)

SEA MYSTERY.

MISSING PROFESSOR.

TRAGEDY OF 30 YEARS AGO.

FEATURES OF REAL LIFE DRAMA,

Sailors in windjammers of about 30 years ago, are asked to help in clearing up what may prove to be one of the most amazing mysteries of the last half century—the disappearance of Professor Samuel D'Elmar Taylor, once noted in Manchester, Blackpool and Douglas as "The wizard who looked like Hall Caine. Taylor, who was miseirig after a boating accident off Port Soderick, Isle of Man, about the year 1000, was presumed drowned, but startling information has reached his widow and children that he is still alive and in affluent circumstances. "Clues have come from several quarters," Mr. Wilfred Taylor, of Flixton, near Manchester, tells a pressman, "and they are so remarkable that I trust they will soon lead to a solution of the mystery and restore father to my mother, who has mourned him so faithfully all these years. Boating Tragedy. "One hot July afternoon he put out from Port Soderick in the Manx Maid, a rowing boat, for a few hours' cool air and fishing. His companions were an artist and a Poet Office telegraph operator. The little craft capsized in a sudden squall and only one of the three set foot on shore again. "Dad, however, was an exceptionally strong swimmer—he could keep afloat for hours in a heavy sea —and I have always cluilg to the theory that perhaps he was picked up by an "outward bound sailing ship and taken to India, say, or some other place thousands of miles from England. "People, will, of course, say, 'But, if he were rescued in this way, he would surely have let his wife and children know.' My answer is that probably he was suffering from loss of memory. His head may have been injured. "My theory is supported by the clues we have received. The first came to toe in Liverpool, when I was hurrying to catch a train. A man stopped me and said, 'Your name's Taylor. Your father was not drowned at Port Soderick. I saw him a little while ago. He was well dressed and was wearing dark glasses.' "And a few weeks ago my sister was sitting in a Manchester tram car, when a fellow passenger, a man who was a perfect stranger to her, said suddenly:—"Your father is alive and in affluent circumstances.' She was so astounded by this statement coming, as I say, so abruptly from an utter stranger, that she could neither speak nor act, even when she saw the man preparing to leave the tram." A mariner who has commanded many a sailing ship, gives his opinion thus: — "The professor's son is putting forward no stupid theory," was his verdict. Don't forget that a sailing ship, picking up a man in the Irish Sea ancl then squaring away, say, for a 20,000 miles run to San Francisco, would not be a modern liner equipped with wireless. She would be out of touch with land and the ordinary (r#i-s of men for inonths. "True, the rescue would be logged, but the rescued man himself might walk ashore in the first- port she touched, and the ship herself might not get back to her home port, for three years. In circumstances like these, a man who had lost his memory could easily lose his bearings for the rest of his days."