NO PANIC.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 25 April 1907, Page 1

NO PANIC.

There i3 a melancholy satisfaction in being able to record that everybody concerned in this catastrophe seems to have behaved with courago and coolness. There was no panic, no headlong rush of the strongest to secure personal Selfish safety at the cost of the weaker, as in another recent shipwreck. No ; captain, officers, crew, and passengers of the" ill-fated steamer all seem to have behaved. splendidly, so did the gallant Dutcll iifebOatmeri at the Hook of Holland. They used every ( human effort to rescue those still surviving ofl the wreck, and stood by her all the long hours of tjie following day and night, in the pifiless storm, bitter cold and raging Se^. But to reach the wreck itself or its inmates Was absolutely impossible* Even a.t the time of writing, thirtysix hours after the disaster, the efforts at rescue are" still going on. The pathetic incidents are innumerable. One particularly piteous one was the picking up of a piSCfi of board which had been washed ashore and on which was written in copying-ink pencil a despairing entreaty for help from fifteen persons on board, . who dated it from the "Smoking Room, s.s. Berlin," where those hapless passengers were helplessly awaiting their doom. Forty or fifty bodies have already been washed ashore, mostly in a state of shocking mutilation arms, legs, and even heads being torn off ; the spectacle as they lie side by side in an extemporised mortuary is described as horrible in the highest degree.