WRECK OF THE P. AND O. STEAMER TASMANIA.

Evening Star, Issue 726, 2 July 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

WRECK OF THE P. AND O. STEAMER TASMANIA.

DISGRACEFUL DISORGANISATION AND SHAMELESS CONFUSION.

(From Our Special Correspondent.]

London, April 29.

The facts that have come to light in connection with the wreck of the Tasmania will seriously shake public confidence in the much-vaunted efficiency of the P, and 0. service. If the graphic and thrilling narrative of the catastrophe contributed by a well-known Anglo-Indian to Tuesday’s ‘Standard’ be accurate, there can be no doubt whatever that the most shameless confusion and disorganisation prevailed. The captain, the officers (save the chief), and the crew seem alike to have lost their heads. Discipline there was none, and, but for the sheerest good luck, the loss of life must have been appalling. Passengers who have travelled by the gorgeous steamers of this line and watched with admiration the smart brass-bound officers superintending boatdrills, fire-drills, and other elaborate preparations for accidents, will learn with surprise and disgust the practical utility of such dress rehearsals. lu the case of the Tasmania, clearly the boat-drill wasn’t even remembered, let alone regarded. The ship’s organisation, in fact, proved a fair-weather one. At the supreme moment of danger it broke down utterly. But I had better, perhaps, allow Mr Allen to speak for himself. He says: “ The Tasmania, a nearly new screw steamer of over 5,000 tons, left Port Said for Marseilles on the evening of Tuesday, the 12th of April, with about 300 souls on board. She was well found and ventilated, the fare excellent, the arrangements of every kind displaying a studious desire on the part of the great company which owned her to secure the comfort and contentment of her passengers. The dinner hour of the following Saturday saw a jovial company gathered in the brilliantly-lighted j saloon, for we were within twenty-four hours j of our voyage’s end, our programmes for the I journey across the Continent were in our : pookets, and every heart beat high with I glad expectancy. Captain Perrin, having seen the ship safe through the Straits of Bonifacio, had retired to his cabin about an ; hour, leaving the second officer (Mr Curtis) in charge. The chief officer (Mr Watkins) was called for his watch at 4 a.m., and due on the bridge seven or eight minutes later. I At four minutes after four the sleeping ship was rudely awakened by a sudden crash, which made her shiver from stem to stern, and roused every soul of us to terrible consciousness. The steady pulse of the screw stopped instantly, making the dead silence of the next few seconds, broken only by the tramp of hurrying feet on the deck above, more appalling. Another deafening crash, and soon three or four crashes in quick the ship staggering with each concussion. Then, from every cabin, men, women, and children rushed in their night-clothes out of the darkness into the dim saloon and towards the companion stairs, filling the air with their piteous cries and agonised inquiries; whilst the rush of water and the roar of voices above increased the horror. There was—there could be—no doubt of what had happened; and if there were, the ominous command for all the passengers to dross as quickly as possible and come upon deck soon dispelled it. Once there the nature of the disaster was but too clear to every one. Day had just broken. From the after bridge, close to the captain’s cabin, where a group of ladies and children, and some two or three husbands, were huddled together, half-dressed, exposed to the bitter north wind, the whole ghastly picture was before us. The ship had run straight upon a reef ; her bows were settling down upon the bottom, some thirty feet, her keel churning up the sand from below and discoloring the sea all around us, whilst her stern was impaled high upon a rock. She was lying over to leeward, so that her windward side opposed a barrier to the waves, but for which none could have been saved. In our rear, less than a stone’s throw distant, was a substantial beacon of masonry, on the wrong side of which our course had been taken, over which the waters perpetually broke, sweeping all the fore-part of the half-submerged vessel; beyond, the open sea. In front and to our left an eager group of men, with the chief officer in com- ' mand, were struggling to lower the two starboard boats, two out of the three which, j so early, alone remained of the eight there were originally. They had been removed within the davits from which they were suspended the day previously, which greatly increased the difficulty of releasing them, and, from the ship listing over, had become jammed. There was a crowd of passengers at the gangway ladder, eager to be taken off'; some aft, standing by their life-buoys, others already in the rigging, in preparation for the worst. Lying oft the wreck, a hundred yards away, was the gig, with the doctor (Powell) and carpenter, both of whom had swum off to it, in charge. The long line of coast, with a lighthouse at the point, lay before us, with here and there a village nestling in the hills, a tower, or a patch of cultivation, the mid-distance broken by a line of jagged reef. At last the doctor’s boat got away with some six or eight ladies and children, and at last-for it seemed an eternity, though only an hour or two—the two other boats were launched. The second boat, in charge of the boatswain, was ‘ rushed ’ by the second-class passengers, some thirty people, all of whom, with two honorable exceptions—men, women, and children —got away, the men who had jumped into the boat in the course of lowering it refusing the captain s peremptory order to them to leave it. The third—the lifeboat—was in charge of Mr Andrews, an officer in the Company’s service on leave, the second, third, and fourth officers of the ship accompanying him. She bore away some fifty or sixty ladies and children—all save two of the former—Mrs Walker and Mrs Pigott, who elected to remain with their husbands. The work of getting the forlorn fugitives lowered was one of great difficulty and danger, for the boats rose and fell on the heavy ground swell a height of from twelve to fifteen feet, and, whilst the children were thrown on board, their mothers had to be lifted in at the critical moment when the boat was poised on the rising wave. To write of the mute agony of what seemed those last farewells would be profanity. Suffice it that the women behaved with the calmness and courage of martyrs. We saw them safely off with a sense of infinite relief, and for the time our spirits rose almost to cheerfulness as wo counted the chances that tbe wreck would hold together and rescue come. Yet our plight was pitiable enough. It was now 10 a.m. A small sup of whisky and a few fragments of biscuit, more or less soddened with salt water, recovered from the passengers’ cabins by the stewards, was our fare. As the day wore on the wind strengthened, and the waves, breaking over the wreck with increasing violence, not only deluged our scanty clothing and half paralysed us with cold, but obliged us to cling to the bulwarks for dear life. By degrees the captain s cabin and the companion went, and one after another our frail shields from the force of the enemy were carried away. The_ captain himself was among the earliest victims. A part of the skylight oi the engine-room, which had been unshipped, knocked him on his feet and pinned him at a moment when relief was almost.impossible, and the backwash of the sea carried him away. Most of us then sought refuge at the stern end of the poop, in the lee of the smoking saloon, and joined the group, which was still in comparative safety there. Meantime, the chief officer, almost deserted by his crew, but aided loyally by some of the passengers, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, Major Croker, of Lord Dufferin’s Staff, among them, bad contrived to rig up a couple of

rafts, each of which might have carried fifteen or twenty at once. One of these was washed overboard with a solitary Lascar, who sprang upon it when just ready for launching, and with it the Earl, who, however, managed to save himself by almost a miracle ; the other,, when already floated, was taken possession of by eight of the Seedee Boys, who calmly cut the rope before our eyes ; but they paid dearly for their treachery, as, being unable to steer their craft, they were borne away into the broken waters near the reef, and on |y 0116 man reached the shore. At about 4 p.m. the look-out announced that a craft of some sort was approaching, and, after a long and weary wait, we made out that it was the lifeboat. Once again our spirits rose; the precautions necessary to stop the Native crew from rushing it, the need of giving prior deliverance to the injured and invalid of our company—for one, Sir Bradford Leslie, had been almost crippled by a fall—were eagerly discussed. But, alas, the boat, evidently undermanned, was making little or no way, and by dusk she went about and made once more for land. So much we could conjecture, that her living freight was safe ; but what of the remaining boats ? What could we conclude from their also making no sign ? As we learned eventually, however, their passengers had all reached the shore safely, at distances varying from five to thirteen miles; and it may suffice to add here that whatever the simple peasants of the rude coast could do to lighten the sufferings of the shipwrecked people was done with such self-denying thoroughness and generous sympathy as entitles them to the gratitude of every Englishman. The officials at the little town of Sartene and Propriana, through whose agency and that of the British Consul at Ajaccio the sufferers were able to rejoin their husbands and friends, vied with their humbler neighbors in the performance of these ennobling offices. As dusa began to set in the wind, still increased, and we were evidently in for a bad night. By night, beyond two or three of our number who remained outside from first to last, and some of the crew who still clung to the rigging, or perforce sought precarious shelter on the deck, we had all squeezed into the smoking saloon a low room strongly built of steel, about sixteen by fourteen, and nine feet high, with a pentroof of thick glass, and barred windows with Venetian sh utters all round, No words of mine could quite picture to another the horrors of that terrible night. There were seventy or eighty human beings—passengers and stewards and sailors, black and white—huddled into that cage, the sea breaking with stupendous force upon it, dashing through and over the roof and windows, drenching its occupants, swamping the floor. As each succeeding wave struck it the wreck shuddered and shook; the metal keel grated on the bottom with a scrooping sound; the receding wave left us with a swirl and a roar, and we held our breath in suspense whilst for an instant it seemed as though the weight of the blow had dislodged us from the rock on which we were mercifully pinned. Then there was the pitiful cry of the Lascar or Seedee Boy, who would force himself desperately into the doorway, only to add to the number of helpless and paralysed of his kind already cumbering the ground, and who was, in mercy to the rest, ejected, only to die of exposure in the open ; the frequent warning to be careful of our one poor lamp ; the weary inquiry as to the hour of a man who had a watch ; the false alarms from without and within of people whose fevered fancies conjured up a rocket or a light. Worst of all, perhaps, our own reflections, for we were face to face with death. All this till about 11 p.m., when the wind changed and slackened, the soa gradually fell, and we felt relieved of the certainty that but for this, in a few hours at the most, the end must have come. With the first glimpse of daylight the lookout reported a sail on the horizon, and in the right quarter, but, already the prey of several false alarms, wo re fused for an instant to bo beguiled. A quarter of an hour later and all doubt was removed. It was not only a sail, but a steamer, and making for us in a beeline. What our feelings were only wrecked men can realise. We were saved. In less than an hour a trim little yacht, the Norseman, belonging to Mr .I’latt, of Oldham, was at anchor a few lengths from what remained of the Tasmania, and within another hour or so she had sailed with us for Ajaccio, from which port she had started for our rescue at 1 a.m., and we bid adieu to our gallant saviours with a feeling of gratitude that can never be effaced. There are legally-appointed tribunals which will lose no time in making a competent inquiry into the cause of the above terrible calamity, and I will not presume even to hint at the due apportionment of blame. But that a ship should be lost in fair weather, on a moonlight night, on a well-lighted coast—that this is a matter requiring searching investigation is evident. It may lie trusted also, that the Court will pronounce some opinion on the question both of age and the test of fitness for command in the persons of the captains of those large passenger ships, upon whom such an enormous responsibility in respect of human life devolves. We all liked and respected Captain Perrin, a kind and courteous gentleman, full of solicitude for the comfort of his passengers ; but he had been more than twenty years in many trying latitudes, was obviously in bad health, and, when the blow fell, was utterly dazed and almost helpless, and quite incapable of taking his proper place. The Company must pay men more and retire them in their prime. But if poor Captain Perrin was physically unfit to face a great disaster, what shall I say of the crew ? It was almost a Lascar crew. About such crews in general I offer no opinion ; but about the utter and lamentable collapse of this particular one there is absolutely no doubt. When the ship struck a number of these men rushed to the two port boats on the poop and let them down in a panic, with the ports open, only to capsize. From that moment the Native crew became impervious alike to order, remonstrance, or threat. They were so many logs, and worse. Again, several of the stewards began looting those cabins which were accessible at an early date ; and it will be necessary to inquire why, if No. 2 boat could be trusted in charge of one petty officer, it required that a special officer should take command of the life-boat, with the second, third, and fourth officers to help him. Had these no possible duties still onboard? I say with regret, but with the utmost deliberation, that there was something seriously at fault in the discipline of the ship’s company. It was a fair-weather organisation, but the moment a strain was put on it, it broke up. May I crave a few lines more of your space to publish the names of those of the ship’s officers who by general consent did well. Mr Watkins, the chief officer, behaved nobly, the passengers presenting him with a purse and a handsome written testimonial before they parted; Mr Leslie, the chief engineer; Mr Baigent, the chief steward; Mr Salter, one of thp cabin stewards; the storekeeper; and Mrs Arnold, one of the stewardesses, de? serve our warm thanks. Among the second class passengers Stormont and Cufflin, who refused to save their skins at the price of their manliness, earn honorable mention. Of the passengers, Major Cooper, brave, cheerful, full of resource under difficulties, did admirably. Indeed, I may say, on the authority of tlm chief officer, who had every opportunity of judging, that the coolness and discipline shown by the large body of passengers was extraordinary; in only one instance did I see the white feather, and that not in the ease of an Englishman. The total loss of life was thirty-four, including the captain, fifth officer (drowned whilst lowering the boats), and Quartermaster Hall, washed from the rigging. The deaths were almost wholly among the Seedee Boys and Lascars, from cold ana exposure.”