JUST IN TIME.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 24, 29 January 1938, Page 11

JUST IN TIME.

' i DRAMATIC RESCUE. ' i STRANDED SURVEY PARTY. \ i ALMOST STARVED TO DEATH.' I . 1 (Special.—By Air Mail.) \ TOROXTO, January 7. Fifteen bearded, withered figures, bent , with starvation, cramp, staggering and 1 ;fa7iing in the snow, greeted an aeroplane f I which came out of the Arctic skv on Xew Year's morning to save them from death. Lieut.-Colonel .T. Romeo Cuenet. his f nineteen-year-old son, and thirteen other members of a survey nartv stranded on • ' • ,v James Bar, inlet of Hudson Bay. Xortli; Quebec, had lived since Xovember 22 on; the flesh of fourteen rabhits and four, squirrels and soup made from birch bark. Flight-Lieut. C, H. Spradbrow, rescue pilot, said that within a day or two the , weakest would have died .is blizzard upon blizzard assailed their last stand against the northern winter. Here is Spradbrow's story: j "Rodolphe Houde, a contractor, sent: the party into the wastelands by "planej He planted a cache of food ami snow-jJ' shoes for them on October 22 at a pre- <?' arranged spot beside a big lake. p: "Houde flew up there on December 21 al to collect the party. He found the cache u untouched. He at once sent messages to ol Indian settlements to send out search S' 'thirties. j , "I was ordered up. I had to watch for d big triarrles of bush, about thirty feet E long, the distress signal to aircraft in the h north. Snow can easily be shaken off the a bush to leave it black against the white ° for us to see. ci "On Xew Year's morning I got away n early. Soon I saw four men signalling t frantically. e; 'Like Scarecrows.' "I found a patch, of good ice and. set 7 the ship down. t "The scene was indescribable. They f all came out to welcome me, even the I weakest. t

"They -were dreadfully emaciated. Their clothes hung on them like scarecrows. Their cheeks were sunken. Their glazed eyes seemed to be shrunk back into their heads. "This Colonel Guenet is certainly the hero of the story." (Here Spradbrow said nothing about the nerve and skill needed to set his 'plane down on a pat?h of ice). "He is a big man, weighing i normally over 200 pounds (I4st 41b). j Now I should say he is less than 100. '"He told me how they had searched for a month for the food cache. By November 22 they were too weak W carry on. "They were only ton miles awny from the cache, but the country is a wilderness of swamps broken with lakes. The j lake they wore looking for was frozen and snowed over. ■' "They held prayer* every niarht and ' never lust hope or none. v "I took the sickest man and flew hark fur help tor ihe n>st of them." , Two neroplmes completed the rc-i-nr. Doctors report tliat although terrihl\ , weak, all arc likely to recover. (|