ADRIFT ON THE ICE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 202, 23 May 1936, Page 22

ADRIFT ON THE ICE

Perils of Sealing

The seven American youths who were carried out to sea ou au icefloe recently were lucky, writes Norman Hope, in a Loudon journal. They had 22 hours’ exposure in temperatures well below /freezing-point, and for part of the time, anyway, they must have wondered if they were drifting to their death. But they were rescued—and only one, whose feet were frozen, was seriously the worse for the adventure.

Lucky—yes'; for drifting ice has been responsible for many tragedies. 'When the Newfoundland sealers sail north in March, it often happens that a small party of men are dropped on an icefield to deal with a colony of seals. They are picked up later on. But sometimes, when the northeasterly gales are blowing, the pack ice is broken up—and the luckless sealers find themselves adrift; with no hope of rescue. When their ship returns they are no longer there. On they drift, farther and farther out into the Atlantic, until at last they perish miserably. In spite of repeated tragedies, however, men still take this appalling risk. Similarly, there arc numbers of fishermen who will walk out over pack ice to open water in order to carry on their fishing. They know—none better —the danger of the ice from which they are fishing breaking away; but they carry on. Even when they do their fishisg through holes in the ice, the peril still exists. Five fishermen found that out on Lake Michigan recently. They were on a tloe which became detached from the pack ice inshore and was carried far out into the lake.

Coastguards rescued three of them in a boat, but there was no room for the other two. But that night one of the coastguards took out the boat again. A blizzard had blown up, however, and though the boat reached the fishermen, it was frozen in immediately afterwards.

They could not light their way through tlic blizzard. They had to .stay in the boat. Gradually the extreme cold did its work. The youngest man of the party rubbed, shook—and even thrashed his two companions in an effort to keep the blood circulating, though they begged him just to let them die.

Then, in the young man’s own words: “At last they did not move or speak. They became rigid as posts. I passed my hand over their faces and felt ice. Soon they were caked with ice all over.”

They were dead. He could not help them any more. But he determined to make one last effort to save himself. He climbed out of the boat on to the ice. lie was so weak that he couldn’t stand. But he crawled. For what seemed an eternity he made his painful way over the ice on hands and knees. On and on until at last he reached land. He had crawled eight miles through darkness and killing cold. When he was found, lying exhausted on the shore, both his feet and one hand were frozen. He will lose his legs. But it is a miracle that he is alive.

In another recent case 17 men wore carried out to sea off the coast of Nova Scotia. The motor-boats which set out to rescue them had to run the gauntlet of scores of icebergs. But they succeeded in taking all the men off safely. An appalling experience fell to (lie lot of .14 Estlionian fishermen five years ago. For 15 days they drifted in the Bailie on an.ice-floe. They had no provisions and would have died of starvation if they hadn’t managed to catch two seals, whose meat kept them alive till finally the floe was washed ashore on the coast of Latvia. That was a fortunate chance. Had winds or currents been slightly different, they might never have been heard of again. Sometimes very large numbers of •men are involved in an adventure of this kind. Only the other day news came through that 2000 fishermen and 140 horses were adrift on ice-floes in the Caspian Sea. In this case, the men, knowing the danger of the ice breaking away from the shore, had taken sufficient food and fuel with them to last 40 days. As the ice carried them out to the optn sea, they calmly went on with their fishing. The largest group of men was equipped with wireless and kept in touch witli the shore by that, means. Aeroplanes were sent out to look for the others, and succeeded in locating them all.