EXPLOSION AND FIRE

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 147, 18 March 1931, Page 9

EXPLOSION AND FIRE

Sealing Ship Disaster FATE OF EXPEDITION Survivors Adrift on Ice TWENTY REPORTED DEAD By Telegraph—Press Assn—Copyright. New York, March 16. Bowring ' Brothers, Limited, owners of the sealer Viking, received word on Monday that the vessel had exploded off Horse Island, White Bay, Newfoundland, killing twenty persons. According to information brought by men ‘ walking ashore, all the crew are not landed yet. Steamers with doctors and nurses have been dispatched to the rescue. On board the Viking were Captain Abraham Kean, Mr. Varick Frissell, a film director, and a crew of 150. One report said that an explosion was heard on Saturday night and that the ship seemed to be burning. The Viking was the only sealer. In the neighbourhood. Three vessels are searching.

■Later messages received at St. John’s from White Bay reported that surviving members of the crew of a vessel not identified, which was burned to the water’s edge, and believed to be the Viking, are marooned on a loose ice-pack in the North Atlantic, and are drifting seaward. The Premier of Newfoundland, . Sir Richard Squires, read to the Legislative Assembly a message from Horse Island announcing that some members of the crew of the Viking had arrived, and reported that men are lying on icefloes, which have broken up. The Assembly then adjourned. So far only meagre reports of the tragedy are to hand. Mr Varick Frissell is a Yale graduate and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He conducted explorations along the Labrador coast for several years and headed r expedition last year, returning in March with photographic and sound records of Labrador sealers at work capturing seals on the ice. It is believed in motion picture circles that Mr. Frissell is now in Labrador making another picture. .