TYPHOON'S CAREER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 238, 7 October 1936, Page 9

TYPHOON'S CAREER.

HONGKONG HARD HIT. PIRATE COLONY'S PLIGHT. i . • STARVATION FACED. I HONGKONG, September 10. The director of the Royal Observatory here, Mr. C. W. Jeffries, has had the rare experience of charting a typhoon, which headed out from the Philippines in a straight line across the China Sea, and did not swerve from that path until it had hit Hongkong with a force twice recorded at 131 miles an hour. Tens of thousands of trees were smashed, many uprooted entirely; houses collapsed, boats disappeared and Steamers dragged anchors, some being totally lost; and the coasts were strewn with wreckage and strange _ marine life, mostly starfish and giant jelly-fish. In* Bias Bay, the successful pirate colony just outside the British Colonial waters, there has been extensive destruction to the growing crops of rice and fruit. Scores of the rude houses were demolished, and many boats were carried to sea and lost. Slow starvation in the next few weeks will be the inevitable lot of numbers of the inhabitants unless a few raids are carried on.

A humorist, in a letter to the "South China Morning Post," has raised a knotty golf problem in connection with the typhoon. He claims to be an eye witness of a remarkable shot made by a Major Force. The two had gone to the golf course, laid out inside the racecourse in Happy Valley, in order to study''the effects on a "ball driven into a violent circular gale. The major made a hole in one, but, just as they were looking at the ball nestling comfortably in the cup, the ball was twirled out of the hole by the cyclonic gales and deposited in the next hole. The writer wants to know if the major made two holes in one shot; and, secondly, if the ball had been lifted out and deposited in the hole previously made, would the major have made two holes in one shot, or minus one hole?