SEA GRAVEYARDS

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 August 1934, Page 12

SEA GRAVEYARDS

LONG-FORGOTTEN SHIPS. On the beaches of Kerguelen, in the South Indian Ocean midway between the Cape and Australia, sealing and whaling crews have found the wreckage of years piled high. Some of it is obviously timber and deck cargoes washed overboard in gales; but much is, beyond doubt, the bones of forgotten ships. Kerguelen was visited during the search for the Danish training ship Kobenhavn, which disappeared several years ago, but it was impossible at the time to make a thorough investigation of this graveyard. There are remote places in the world so little explored that, they may provide solutions to old mysteries of the sea. The discovery made in a lonely creek in Tierra del Fuego by the British cruiser Glasgow is an example. During the World War the Glasgow was searching for the German cruiser Dresden near this peninsula, when she found the wreck of a Nova Scotian wooden barque reported missing 50 years before. The skeletons of the crew were lying on the barque’s rotting decks. WHEN LA PEROUSE VANISHED. More remarkable still was the solution. after nearly 40 years, of the disappearance of two French exploring frigates, Boussole and Astrolabe, in the Pacific Ocean. La. Perouse, the commander of the expedition, and 222 men, left Botany Bay, Australia, in 1788, and were not. heard of again, in spite of many searches, until a British ship in 1827 discovered crested silver plate, a part of a ship’s stern and other relics on the then little known island of Vanikoro. La Perouse and nearly all his men had been either drowned or massacred by savages. Other lonely islands have thrown light on mysterious sea disasters. A French transport became a total loss on Tromelin Island, a mere sandspit partly covered with bush and trees, far from the Indian Ocean fishing tracks. Twenty years went by. Then the master of a passing vessel sent, a boat ashore. Two wretched coloured women were found. All the rest had died. These women had lived alone on a dial consisting mainly of shellfish. The steamer Waikato in 1899 was given up for lost. Her engines had broken down when she was well to the south of Cape Agulhas, bound for New Zealand, and for three months and a half she drifted in an east-south-east-erly direction. By chance the steamship Asloun found her and towed her to port. Derelicts have drifted right across the Atlantic: some have made a circuit and returned almost to the positions where they were abandoned, in the -days of sail many of these dead ships menaced the North Atlantic trade routes; even to-day the pilot charts record them. There is no telling how long may bo the career of a wooden ship without a crew. The whaler Jennie of Portland, Me., reported as missing, is said to have remained afloat for 37 years in the last, century. Skeletons and the log book told the story of mutiny and the starvation of the survivors. The wooden schooner Wyer G. Sergent, loaded with mahogany, was abandoned off Cape Hatteras in a “sinking condition.” Two years later she was still afloat, her movements having made a maze on the chart. 'Hiis ghost of the ocean must have drifted at least 5000 miles before she vanished, . . , Provision depots are maintained on many remote outlying islands, and scores of castaways have made use of them. The New Zealand Government has gone a step further by placing guardians on several remote islands to the southward where shipwrecks have often occurred.