CAUGHT BY QUICKSANDS

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3308, 30 March 1926, Page 6

CAUGHT BY QUICKSANDS

A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE FISHERMEN’S LUCKY ESCAPE In sight Of the golf course at Soujthport, and not far from the lake where toy yatchs go sailing in the summer, a horso and cart sank in a quicksand just as it happens in stones Who could have thought that a quicksand, like that in Sir Walter Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor,- or Victor Hugo's famous sjtory of the Brittany coast, could engulf a man and horse in the placid Southport Channel? Two fishermen, each with a cart and horso, were out on the sands at low tide, seeking shrimps on the edge of one of the branches of the channel. Suddenly, without warning, the horse and cart of fishermen Wright vanished, leaving nothing visible except the heads of the driver and of the plunging horse. The other fisherman, Watkinson, was about 10 yards away, and luckily had a length of rope. Ho threw it to Wright, who caught it at the second attempt, when Watkinson, urging on his own horse, managed with a great deal of difficulty to drag Wright ‘ toward him.

More than once it seemed as if the attempt to save him would fail. His horse and cart went altogether, sinking into the sand and water, and he would have followed them if he had not found a foothold on a box, to which he afterwards clung. Halffloating, he was thus dragged toward Watkinson, whose own horse and cart began to slip periously toward the quicksand.

When Wright was at last brought to firm ground by his friend he had fainted, and was almost like a drowned man. Certainly, no Southport shrimper ever went farther down the jaws of a quicksand and returned to life.