LIQUOR-SHIP SINKS

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 69, 15 December 1931, Page 9

LIQUOR-SHIP SINKS

Shots from Customs Boat TWO SURVIVORS RESCUED Oslo, December 12. Brought ashore near Maaloey famishing and exhausted on a boat bearing the corpses of four of their shipmates, the English first officer, Savage, and the German engineer, Erhault, gave news of the fate of their Polish captain, Visnagrotsky, and the English and German members of the crew of the rum-running steamer Venus, owned in London and flying tho Panama flag, which ■ sank after an encounter with a Customs vessel. The police had been searching for the Venus since a coastguard cutter fired twenty shots at her after she left Lerwick, Shetland Islands, with 5000 gallons of liquor aboard. The vessel subsequently—possibly as a result of the gunfire—ran on some rocks near Bergen. ■ The crew got her off, leaking badly. They pumped desperately until she again grounded and foundered in fifteen fathoms.

The crew fought safety in the two boats, and pieces of floating wreckage. Visnagrotsky broke an arm when leaving the Venus, and was drowned. The first boat capsized, six men being drowned. The second boat overturned, but the seven men aboard drifted, clinging to the sides and bottom, until two died from exposure to the bitter cold. Savage flew distress signals which were observed by fishermen, who rescued the survivors, two of whom succumbed after being brought ashore. Savage and Erhault are expected to recover.

A motor-boat has been dispatched to seek possible additional survivors. The police caught Visnagrotsky rumrunning to northern Norway in 1930 with the schooner Emmanuel, which the authorities confiscated, fining the captain, whom they expelled from Norway for smuggling into that country six thousand gallons of liquor. The Venus was formerly the German trawler Wobke. The captain while at Lerwick engaged a local crew, and married a Lerwick girl, whose brother is among the missipg. The sheriff, consequent on a statement by Savage, who was too prostrate to identify his dead shipmates, arrested him. The British Consular Agent wjll attend the inquest on the victims to-morrow. Diving or salvaging will ascertain the exact cause of the disaster, which is not believed to be due to the three warning and fifteen direct shots which the cutter fifed at the Venus, but the striking of two rocks in succession in a terrifflc gale. Many barrels of liquor are afloat at the scene of the wreck. WIFE INTERVIEWED Third Shipwreck in Three Years London, December 13. The wife of Walter Denis Savage, surviving first officer of the Venus, has not received any official intimation of the disaster. Interviewed at" her Thames-side house in the heart of Dockland, she said that she had been unable to eat or sleep owing to the shock. She expressed thankfulness for the safety of her husband, whom she expected home for Christmas.

“This is his third shipwreck in six years,” she said. “The first was between Antwerp and London, the second in the collision which sank the Continental freighter in the River Scheldt, giving him two months’ pleurisy without compensation. It cannot go on; he must leave the'sea. He would not have shipped this time but for being workless for eleven months. He hated drawing the dole. I don't undertsand this rum-running story.” Both Savage and his wife come from seafaring stock. His wife has an uncle who is a lieutenant-commander, and two uncles, a brother-in-law. and six nephews are master mariners. Her husband enlisted in the Second Suffolks at the age of sixteen and was wounded in Flanders.