SIX MONTHS ON AM ICE FLOE.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLVI, Issue 196, 19 August 1912, Page 2

SIX MONTHS ON AM ICE FLOE.

"MOST AMAZING ESCAPE IN

HISTORY."

"There is widespread regret among the hardy fisherfolk of Newfoundland that there was nobody on board the Titanic to suggest the obviously simplest and most effective method of saving the whole 2500 people on board. This could yhave been done by simply utilising the ice floes in the vicinity as gigantic rafts, to which the pasengers and crew might have been transfererd," writes the Hon. P. T. McGrath, a member of the Legislative Council of Newfoundland, in Canada.

"It seems incredible," he proceeds, "that in all the immense multitude of people aboard the liner nobody thought of this simple solution. It is one that would have immediately commended itself to a Newfoundlander, and it is one that has already won historical recognition through . the most amazing escape in the whole annals of authentic adventure.

"I refer to the famour ice floo journey of the survivors of the Arctic steamer Polaris, who, in April, 1873, wore picked up by the Newfoundland sealing steamer Tigress on an ice floe on the Grand Banks, after having drifted some 1600 miles on this precarious foothold, their absolutely unique voyage having occupied 193 days.

"The ship had been crushed in the ico in North Greenland waters the previous November, and, as is the invariable practice in these regions, they abandoned the ice-gored hull and took to the floes in order to reach the land, but, a storm coming up, the fragment on which they had established themselves was driven southward, and for six months it was their floating home until rescue reached them on the Grand Banks.

WHOLE FAMILIES ON FLOES

"This, however, though v the most remarkable case of its kind 4 is by no means the only case of shipwrecked people escaping death by taking refuge on an ice floe. Whenever a Newfoundland sealing steamer is crushed by the pack—as happens to one or other of the flotilla' almost every spring—the crew at once betake themselves to the nearest floes with their clothing, provisions, boats, and other impedimenta, and there remain until some others of the fleet come upon them and take them aboard. They are not dismayed by the prospect of a day's or a week's detention. "Fishing crews making their way to Labrador in the early summer resort to the same expedient when .their ships are crushed, and there are numerous cases on record where these people—men, women, and childi^eri — have been adrift for several days before being picked up. Scores of^ such tales could be told> where cod-'' fishers and seal-hunters hare, escaped from peril by this* simple expedient. Those on board the Titanic might just as easily have done the same.

"Any number of fragments were available to which the first boatloads could have been transferred while the boats made a second and a third trip to the ship and brought off the re> mainderof the people. . . . The women and children from Newfoundland vessels.^obliged to leave their beds in the darkness of night have survived experiences of this kind for from three to seven days, and therefore it is unlikely that any great number of those on the Titanic^ however delicately nurtured, or however poorly equipped for this enforced imprisonment on an ice floe, would have suffered any ill-effects." '