DOOMED VESSEL DRAMA

Evening Star, Issue 21254, 8 November 1932, Page 9

DOOMED VESSEL DRAMA

TWO MEN'S FATAL DISPUTE

PROBLEM OF LAST TO LEAVE,

While a ninety-five-mile-an-hour wind was lashing the London cargo steamer, Watford, which lay with her back broken on the rocks of Nova Scotia recently, two men stood on the deck and argued with each other. The story of this last argument was . told when'the thirty survivors of the j vessel reached Liverpool m the liner j Adriatic. “When we were driven on, to the rocks we tried to lower a boat, ■ said one of them. “ Failing in this, tbs > second officer, Mr H. Mant, volunteered: to swim ashore with a rope. He gotj there after a terrible struggle, but the rope was swept loose from the ship. “ We fired rocket lines to Cape Breton fishermen and rigged up a bos n s ‘chair’ from ship to shore. One byl one the crew were hauled across until, only two men remained in the ship-- j the mate and the bos’n. On the_ sands ,■ the rest of the crew were waiting to] help them, but there was a delay—the i two men seemed to be making no effort" to get ashore. The mate and the bos n had begun to argue. “ While the hurricane—the worst on the coast for sixty years—was raging, the two figures could be seen gesticulating. Neither would agree to go first and leave the other. Finally they decided to go together. The _ bos’u climbed into' the swinging ‘ chair ’ on the line, and the mate tried to get in beside him, but he suddenly lost his hold, fell into the sea, and was drowned.” . , The mate was Mr William Knight, of Aberdeen, and the bos’n is Mr Donald Murray, of Stornoway, in the Hebrides.