French help for injured New Zealander

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32959, 4 July 1972, Page 1

French help for injured New Zealander

(From

SELWYN PARKER

PAPEETE, July 3. A Dunedin student, Craig Reeves, is in a French military’ hospital in Papeete, after touching the brink of death in a whaleboat accident off Pitcairn Island. The combined resources of the French Navy, Air Force 'and Medical Division were re. ■quired to take 19-year-old Mr (Reeves from the storm-bound T.tcaim to an operating I theatre in the Jean Prince .Military Hospital, more than 1000 miles away in Papeete. “If it were not for the French, I would not be alive,” Mr Reeves said from his private room in the hospital. He suffered a broken left leg, a severe gash on the same leg, bruises, coral cuts and abrasions and a torn muscle. He also nearly drowned.

Since the accident, the leg wound has become infected,

but the French doctors expect to control the infection.

Mr Reeves’s brush with death began on June 26, the day after French nuclear scientists were reported to have detonated the first bomb test at Mururoa Atoll.

After a sojourn on the island where he once lived as a 14-year-old boy, Mr Reeves was due to leave in tile Port Montreal, a Port Line freighter. He put off from the island in a 37ft whaleboat with 15 islanders. Tom Christian, the island’s radio operator and Warren Christian were also aboard. Warren Christian took the tiller as the whaleboat put off from Bounty Bay in what Mr Reeves described as “huge seas.”

As well as putting Mr Reeves aboard the Port Montreal, the islanders planned to take cargo from the freighter. As Mr Reeves tells it, the whaleboat had almost burst through the breakers, having picked its run well, when a

25ft roller lurched up behind the craft. “We got through that all right. But the bow buried itself into a wave ahead and turned the boat side-on. The seas pushed us on to the rocks.

“Rocks came through the forward part of the boat and holed us, while Warren Christian tried to keep the bow head-on to the seas.

“That was only for about 30 seconds, then he shouted, ‘Every man for himself.” The rest of the islanders leapt overboard on the seaward side and were swept out by the tide, but Mr Reeves and an Englishman were knocked back by a big wave at the moment they jumped. The wave swept them across the boat and under it, between the boat and the rocks. The Englishman was knocked into a hollow, but Mr Reeves was unable to escape the pounding of the wooden 37ft boat. Tom Christian had also broken his leg against the

rocks, and was swept out and then back, like the others. “I was 10 minutes in the water alone, with the boat banging my head. I was just about to take my last mouthful of air and go under,” Mr Reeves said. Then another Islander, Noggie Young, seized Mr Reeves. “He said later he saw me going down and then grabbed me.” Between them Noggie Young and Steve Christian half-paddled, half-pushed Mr Reeves to the shore. “I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for them,” Mr Reeves said. Tom Christian’s wife sent out a distress call, and the French frigate E. V. Henri raced to the island in heavy seas. The French captain sent a doctor, a radio operator, and three medical assistants to

Mr Reeves through dangerous surf. On the first attempt only

the radio operator was able to get through the rollers to the shore. The doctor and his assistants were dragged through the surf with a lifeline belted around their waists. They worked on Mr Reeves, who was in considerable pain from 6 p.m. until 8 a.m. When the waves had grown less fierce, the islanders put out again in a whale boat and were able to swing the Dunedin student, still conscious but pumped full of morphine, across the water to the E. V. Henri, with the doctor straddled across the stretcher to hold it steady. “He could have broken his leg if the whaleboat and the frigate had crashed together,” Mr Reeves said. The seas were still high, and the two

boats were pounding up and down within feet of each other.

The frigate made full steam for the Gambier Islands, 400 miles away. As the vessel

approached the islands, a naval helicopter took off from one of them, Mangareva, winched up Mr Reeves from the deck, and raced him to a nearby airstrip, where a French transport plane was waiting with engines running. Doctors accompanied him on the helicopter, on the plane, and on the escorted ambulance drive from Papeete Airport to the Jean Prince Hospital— a relay of four doctors from Pitcairn.

“I was rushed straight into the operating theatre, and I woke up there,” said Mr Reeves, gesturing around room 132. A French nurse will accompany him when he returns with his mother, Mrs Margaret Reeves, to New Zealand on Monday, provided the infection clears up sufficiently to allow him to travel.