THE WIMMERA WRECK.

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 July 1918, Page 7

THE WIMMERA WRECK.

PASSENGER'S GRAPHIC NARRATIVE. WOMEN’S WONDERFUL ENDURANCE. (Dunedin Star.) We have been permitted to make use ot the following letter, which was written to a Dunedin friend hy one who was a passenger on the Wimmera on her last illfated voyage. This young lady was returning to Sydney after spending a holiday in New .Zealand : Thank yon so much for your kind message of congratulation on our escape and sympathy for our dreadful experience. We had, indeed, a terrible time, and should (and do) feel thankful that we are safe. Had it not been for the calm sea —comparatively calm, for it seemed anything but that when we were being- tossed about on it in a cockleshell of a boat, and when each succeeding wave looked

likely to swamp us and shatter our boat—had it not been, as I have said, that the sea was fairly calm and there was a faint moon shining, and we were only between 21 and 30 miles from land no one would have been saved. I was in one of the deck cabins opening on to the social hall, and had jnsl been out of my bunk looking' out of the porthole when the explosion occurred. I was lying- down at the time, just dropping- off to sleen. I was thrown out of my bunk, amid a confusion of crashing- glass and luggage thrown all over the nlaee. I ran to the two

doors of the social hall opening l on to the deck. They were both locked. The social hall itself was wrecked- Everything' breakable in it was broken. Both doors were locked. I ran back into my cabin, seized a wrapper, couldn't find shoes, and made for the stairs

leading' down to the lower deck, where most of the cabins were. Fell through the place where the stairs should have been, picked myself up, much shaken, and "•roped about in the pitch dark ; fortunately blundetred into the right passage. The moon was giving a little light here through the portholes.

I ran into several of the cabins, calling' up Mrs , but heard and saw no one, and thought they must be on deck. When I got, on deck I ran up and down calling them, but no one. in the confusion answered mo. Then someone in one of the boots said: "They're all right," and I was lifted into a boat, thinking they were there. It was dreadful when the boot was lowered to find they were not in it. We stayed about near the ship imf.il sAvPvnl mnvn linn+.s wptp

lowered; then rowed away towards a lighthouse. After the sun rose we put up the sail—i.e., the men did—l had no hand in it, of course—and directed our course considerably east of the lighthouse, where we thought we could see a line of beach. The rest of the coastline looked grim and forbidding, with hills running right into the sea- * About 1 o'clock we landed successfully on a beautiful beach— Tom Bowling's Bay, a lovely place for a picnic. We are told that it is generally impossible to land here, as the surf is sometimes tremendous; and, indeed, in Saturday's paper there is an account of a boat which tried to land there to bring away some things that

had been left there by the Wimmera people, and which was dashed to pieces, the crew managing, however, to reach the land safely. We stayed on this beach all day. Three oilier boats followed us, guided, by the fires we hod lighted as beacons for them. We were preparing to make ready to spend the night there, under a shelter constructed of sails and oars, mid with only hard biscuit and water for food, when we saw two men on horseback riding towards us along the beach. These proved to be Mr Mnnro, a squatter or cattle-breeder of the district, and his Maori servant.