NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16566, 2 June 1914, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The good news that the Prime Minister is to address a meeting in Christchurch on Friday night is discounted to some extent by the fact that the largest hall ho can obtain is the King’s Theatre, a building capable of seating only 800 or 900 people. This, of course, is not Mr Massey's fault, Christchurch arrain suffering for not having provided Itself with a Town Hall, but it would be a pretty compliment to the citizens if the head of the Government would do as the leader of the Opposition did and speak from the rotunda in Victoria

Square. Not a tenth of the electors who would liko to hear him will bo able to make their way into the King’s Theatre, and probably the people most in need of conversion to the Reform faith will bo among those, excluded.

All doubt regarding the fate of the Karluk, the ship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, is now removed and a great deal of sympathy will bo felt all over the Empire for Mr Viljalmur Stefansoon. Tho loss of the vessel, with stores for five years, must dislocate the plans of the expedition and although the leader may be able still to discharge a portion of the task assigned to him by tho Canadian Government he can hardly hope to recover the ground he has lost. The disaster to the Karluk probably occurred nearly a year ago, but news travels slowly in the Arctic wastes. The ship was an old whaler, of tho type that successive Antarctic expeditions have made familiar to Canterbury people, and Mr Stefansson had hop'd that she would ho able to resist any onslaught of tho ice. But the season of 1913 proved extraordinarily severe in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska and Canada, and apparently the Karluk fell a victim to the ice-floes before the projected voyage into unknown areas of tho polar basin had well begun.

It is interesting to notice that the fate suffered by the Karluk will be dared by Captain. Roald Amundsen in the Fram when the Norwegian expedition goes north. The Karlux got among loose ice on the fringe of the pack which fills a large part of the Arctic basin and was crushed by the driving floes. If the ship had been able to withstand the pressure and had become locked in the ice, the members of the crew might have had to wait with what patience they could command while they drifted slowly across the polar ocean towards Greenland, possibly passing close to the Pole on the way. The journey would have occupied at least five years. Captain Amundsen is going to push the Fram into the ice somewhere near the point where the Karluk was lost, with the object of getting frozen into the drifting ice. If his ship is not crushed before the ice becomes firm, he will spend the next five years moving with the oceftn current over the Arctic Sea, in the direction Mr Stefansson thought the Karluk might have taken when he first lost touch with the vessel.

“We want to know where we are, 1 ’ says the Melbourne “Argus,” in discussing Australia’s naval defence scheme. “We want to find out if it is absolutely necessary that we should spend £1,500,000 a year on the navy as wo are doing now, and, further, if we should go on increasing the fleet which has already cost £4,200,000, until wo reach the total expenditure proposed by Admiral Henderson, namely, £40,000,000 for construction, works, etc., with an annual vote of £4,794,000.” The “Argus," which represents in this matter a growing volume of Australian opinion, has very many doubts about the value of the policy that the Reform Ministers want New Zealand to copy. “As soon as ono naval unit is installed,” it says, “ wo shall be called upon to make preparations for its renewal, at a cost which may soon become a crushing burden on a young and sparse com-

Tnwiity. • • • Tho awful wasto involved in replacing tlie latest type of fighting monster with a newer one, and the possibility of an absolute revolution of ideas owing to the progressive mastery being obtained over tho air, should' constrain us to proceed with great caution." The facts surely should constrain New Zealand to hesitate a very long time before stepping into the path that Australia is painfully treading.

The theory advanced by the sanguine souls who are pegging out auriferous claims on the Ashburton beach, that the gold wh-'ch the sands contain was first brought down by the rivers from the Southern Alps and then washed up again by the ocean surf, is exact y the idea held by the old mu* on the West Coast benches. The belief: is that the gold which was obtained in truly enormous quantities from the heavy black-sand beaches of Okarito and its vicinity in the "sixties in the first case came rolling down the icy streams of the Waiau and other glacial rivers from the slopes of the Southern Alps, that it became embedded in the shelving sand-bars, and that it was periodically piled up on the beaches by the great rollers from the west. The veteran diggers or South Westland believe that there are still rich alluvial deposits deep m the sands, a few yards seaward, but the restless Tasman Sea forbids prospecting in that direction.

There are still a few of the old stock who work the beaches, literally combing them for their golden wealth, and they contrive to make wages, as the miners say. Perhaps in ages to come Nature may provide another golden hoard on the long surf-beaten sands of Okarito. But if the . theory is correct, the matrix of the treasure, the real El Dorado, must be somewhere up in tho Alpine dividing range. Gold is still found after floods in the streams which come from the Franz Josef Glacier and other frozen rivers high up in the mountains. Its appearance here has picturesque possibilities for tho young New Zealand mountaineer. Some day one of oui Alpine climbers may stumble on the motherveef.

As additional details of . tho great maritime tragedy are supplied by the cable the conviction deepens that shipbuilding and nautical scienco have still a long way to go in the devising of life-saving apparatus for use in shipwreck. Under other circumstances of accident every soul in the Empress of Ireland might liavo been .saved. The liner had boats and rafts more than sufficient for those on board, passengers and crow. But the suddenness of the catastrophe appears to have rendered half the boats useless. There was no time to load and launch them, and in the last emergency the people’s only liono was the old-fashioned life--Ik>H. Modern passenger liners are thoroughly well equipped with boats. The great steamer Aquitania, for example, carries more than ninety boats of all kinds, providing room for every person in the ship. Yet in actual practice perhaps not more than half of those boats would bo available on a sudden call, such as that which came to the Empress of Ireland. The list caused by collision or the rolling in a seaway smashes boats and drowns their occupants out of hand, and no

naval architect, human skill having its limitations, has yet been able to devise a thoroughly satisfactory boatloading and launching process fit for any emergency. In such a case as the St Lawrence disaster, where everything must be done in an instant, rafts which would require little or no handling and nhich would float clear as the vessel sank, might ho of more service than the boats in saving precious lives.