LOSS OF THE ADEN.

Evening Star, Issue 10394, 16 August 1897, Page 3

LOSS OF THE ADEN.

A passenger by the R.M.S. Himalaya, which left Melbourne on May 15, tells of the sad tragedy of the loss of the Aden and so many of her passengers, with the captain and all the officers, off the island of Socotra. He writes : —" We passed the Aden, and spoke her only some nine hours before she ran upon the fatal reef, a fate which the Himalaya escaped either by superior steaming power, better seamanship, or better fortune —put it how you will. For the Himalaya had the same course, the same weather, and rough sea to contend with. After leaving Colombo, and for four days on the way to the next port, Aden, a monsoon time of it set in, with a deluge of rain, and a strong wind that vexatiously kept all passengers from the deck. The captain solaced them with the assurance that the wind would be less felt when we ran under the shelter of Socotra, and so it proved for the time we were passing that island. As the ill-fated Aden was following us the wind could not, evidently, have driven her upon the reef, blowing, as it was, from the opposite quarter. The Himalaya appeared to be within a mile of the island, and it is to be supposed that the Aden got nearer to it. The sea was very rough, and the Aden, of so much smaller size and lessor power than the Himalaya, must have felt twice as much trouble from it. The boatful of passengers which got off from the wreck, and ha 9 never been heard of, had probably but a short tims of suffering, and felt not the pangs of starvation and thirst, for the Bea was too rough for such a heavy boatload to live long upon its heaving billows, and in the stormsof rain and wind. On, the night of the disaster to the Aden it is memorable to thoEO on board the Himalaya that those who got into the smoking room were imprisoned there—the storm preventing any exit. The captain and the officers moved about in oilskins and sou'-westers, and mostly baielegged and bare-footed—little matters that told of the roughness of the storm. It. is well understood by all of ub of the Himalaya how on that dreadful night the rapid destruction of the Aden, as told in the detailed narratives published, must have been a sad certainty. The escape of the Himalaya and her larger number of passengers and crew was one of those things that will be accounted for by many on the Scriptural theory only. • Two shall be grinding at the mill—one shall be taken and the other left.'"