SEA MYSTERIES

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 74, 24 September 1927, Page 20

SEA MYSTERIES

PEBILS MET WITH HT STBANGE PLACES.

There are many perils of the sea with which every captain of a ship is prepared to cope when necessary, but there are some .which men of science canont explain, writes W. I\ H, Harrison in the "Port of London Authority Magazine." The southern end of Vancouver Island is one of the danger zones where many ships have been wrecked on the deadly rocks. The Government has built a lighthouse with a foghorn and set out bell buoys, the noise of which ought to be heard for 'some distance, and yet survivors from these wrecks have declared that they heard no sound at all. This can only be accounted for by a '"zone, of silence/ or of "dead air," hovering about this spot, changing with the wind and tide but always in existence. Once a ship is within this zone, no sound, even that of the powerful siren of the Race Bocks Lighthouse, is audible. This phenomenon was experienced by the crew of a small tug which got in amongst the rocks and actually saw the keepers of the lighthouse and yet were unable to detect the roaring signals which were distinctly heard four or five miles in other directions.

Ocean currents shown on all sea charts »re often depended on by the skippers of vessels when the gun is ob-

scured and they are forced to use dead reckoning. 'But even "these may alter either their speed or course, as has been discovered when the Gulf Stream was found to have increased its speed to almost double what it had been. The currents in the North Sea once changed their courses, as was shown when pieces of wreckage, which. usually tended to drift in a southerly direction, were found to be appearing on the northern shores and isles of Great Britain.

In September, 1023, a large steamer was in mid-Atlantic when she suddenly stopped and quivered so violently that it was thought she had struck a wreck. She then moved ahead, but, after a little while began, to tremble from bow to stera for a short timo. This strange occurrence was undoubtedly caused by a submarine earthquake,l and the sea, being about two miles deep, luckily provented serious damage. Another steamer had even a worse experience. About midnight, when some little distance: from Marseilles,

the crew heard a sudden explosion and saw a huge tongue of flame leap out of the sea, and at the same time the ship quivered as if she had been struck. It ■was thought at first that another vessel had blown up, but as *no wreckage could be found, it was attributed to the explosion of. a submarine volcano. If this ship had been over that spot at the time, nothing could have saved her from destruction.

Another peril is that of falling meteors, which are sometimes seen from ships. A large mass of molten (stuff fell from the sky Borne time ago and narrowly missed a large tramp steamer on her way to Hamburg. A similar story was that of a Dutch steamer, the Ocean, when crossing tho Atlantic in 1908, an enormous meteor fell so close to her that tho huge waves flung up and flooded the decks of the ship. Clouds of gas shot forth from where it fell, and tho men on deck had to go below to save themselves f»oni boing suffocated. , .