Grey River Argus and Blackball News SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1922. WILTSHIRE DISASTER.

Grey River Argus, 3 June 1922, Page 4

Grey River Argus and Blackball News

SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1922. WILTSHIRE DISASTER.

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The loss of the liner Wiltshire serves as one more illustration of the danger faced by the men who go down to the sea in ships. In this, as in a large proportion of such cases, the danger is risked chiefly by the working-class, for the Wiltshire belonged to the Mercantile Marine, whereon practically all the travellers are wage-earners. It might have been expected that the master of the vessel would, in the stormy and menacing conditions prevailling off the hazardous Great Barrier Reef last Wednesday night, have preferred safety to any other consideration, and delayed till the light of day came to show him his actual position. But the blame, if any, lies not with him, but with the practices and principles of modern capitalism. The average master mariner of to-day has his eye glued rather to the clock than to the perils of the sea. Take the Titanic disaster, for instance, where the desire, in the pursuit of profits, to create a new speed record for a particular shipping line, disposed the captain to risk the lives of many hundreds of people, with fatal results. It is a well-known fact that, although a mis- , hap will lose a master mariner his post, ’ s nevertheless a premium placed

upon running to time, no matter how dangerous the conditions may be, and the mariner whose caution is such as to make him risk losing time in preference to losing lives will soon find himself out of a job in the typical shipping lines of the present day. Admittedly, a slight error of reckoning is quite sufficient to cause a modern liner to run into danger, so that sea-captains have a great weight upon their shoulders, and deserve the highest praise for their accuracy and attention to duty, as well as for their uniformly high standard of self-sacrifice and ability, but the cutthroat tactics of modern capitalism are well calculated to precipitate many a disaster on the seas. In the case of the Wiltshire there were over 100 lives at stake to say nothing of a valauble cargo, and had it been optional or customary for the captain to study

safety before anything else, ho never might have risked his great vessel or allowed a subordinate to do so, in such a way as to land her in the merciless jaws of a treacherous reef. It is a well-recognised thing that big liners are expected, in the face of any obstacle, to run to time, and it is probable that this convention alone will be responsible in the future for many more disasters on the sea. It is high time that more humane sentiments were invoked to regulate sea transport, and that more penalties were imposed on companies on whose ships lives are risked callously and even insanely in flie mere pursuit of profits. Another regrettable thing is that a port like Auckland should lack sufficient life-saving appliances, and that a reef so treacherous as the Great Barrier should not be better provided for in the same respect in view of the demonstration its history gives of the niPiiucc it is. However, the public will learn with heartfelt relief of the rescue of the crew, whose fate, until Thursday night, looked as if it were sealed. At one time a series of telegrams repeated the grave aprpehonsion that all the 103 men on the storm-swept wreck were doomed, and it stands to the credit of the ship’s own crew that they succeeded in drifting ashore the life-line on which they yesterday were enabled once more to ground their feet on terra firma. The disaster might have been an appalling one, and it is doubtless due to the heroism of the many engaged in this almost tragic drama of the sea that man once more conquered Nature, and turned what looked like proving a holocaust into a glorious rescue*