THE SWATOW TYPHOON.

Evening Star, Issue 18045, 12 August 1922, Page 4

THE SWATOW TYPHOON.

China has had its fill of visitations. With no settled Government, brigandage, not purely confined to the interior, is chronic, and in its more acute periods is dignified by the name of civil war. That, however, is a man-made evil. Those beyond the power of man to avert which have recently afflicted large areas of the country have been famine and flood. A much more localised disaster, but one which strikes the imagination because of the intensity of its results within a circumscribed area, is that which lately overtook Swatow. It is a busy port, somewhere about the size of Dunedin, if Chinese population statistics are at all reliable, situated some 200 miles east of Hongkong. Those who sail the China Sea during the typhoon season are always alive to the possibility of encountering one of these dreaded and fairly frequent manifestations of Nature in a towering rage. To read Conrad’s famous book ‘Typhoon’ is, according to those who have been through one, to get a vivid and accurate secondhand impression of the experience. Mostly the sea captain prefers the open sea, where ho can grope for the relative calm in the centre of the disturbance. To be caught at anchor in harbor is to risk disaster, for no anchors will hold a vessel against some of the wind velocities which develop; and, besides the probability of being piled up a hopeless wreck more or less inland, there is the danger from collisions in the indescribable jumble of overseas and native craft helplessly adrift, hopelessly out of control, and mostly doomed to utter and swift destruction. That is what happened at Swatow, and very much the same thing happened some sixteen years ago at Hongkong. If the casualty figures in the Swatow calamity are anywhere near reliable, it would seem that the greater part of the population has perished, though the statement that some 100,000 people are homeless indicates that devastation has not been confined to the port, but has extended into the area it serves. The gruesome state of affairs drawn by to-day’s cables—a harbor full of corpses, and every erection ashore levelled with the ground, the ruins of buildings being interspersed with those of involuntarily intruding craft of all kinds may sound overdrawn; but those who have seen the effects of a really bad typhoon will know that in reality words fail to adequately describe them. The fatalism of the East is, indeed, needed to bearup against visitations which, perhaps more than any other phenomena, demonstrate so unanswerably the utter impotence of man before angry Nature.-