THE GREAT EASTERN.
* A MEMORY OF THE ILL-FATED SHIP.
The superstitious sailor man, reading of the successful voyages of the Lusitania, will conclude that all the fairies at her launch and christening were benignant in intent. They did not believe that influences as kindly attended the preliminaries for the Great Eastern steamship, and in the end probably said, “I told you so." There was a mystery about that ill fated ship, Nothing went right with her, She stuck at the launch, and it cost an extra £70,000 over and above the sum set aside for the purpose to get her into the water. On her trial trip her boilers burst, killing sonue of stokers. Then she ran aground, and carried on so outrageously that her crew thought her surely bewitched. She had started badly. While she was building, a pay-clerk, sent by one of the contractors, with £1,200 in wages for the men, disappeared. Neither he nor the money could be traced, though tho police searched far and near.
It was not unnaturally assumed that he had bolted with the £I2OO. His\ wife and family were left unprovided for, with the stagma of his supposed crime upon them. Thirty years after her launch the Great Eastern went into the cemetery at Birvenhead to be broken up. While she was being taken to pieces the ship-breakers discovered between her inner and outer casings of steel the skeleton of a man. Papers which had fallen from his clothes enabled his identity to be traced. It was the skeleton of the payclerk, who, thirty years before, had disappeared. There was no money ; that was never recovered.
The supposition is that tho poor fellow on going on to the ship was pounced upon by workmen who knew that he had the money with him ; that they stunned him, and, having a small place in the side of the vessel to complete, crammed his body in and built him up in it.
No reward would have induced a sailor to sail in that vessel had he known qf the terrible secret sealed up in her walls.—“ Evening Standard.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NORAG19080727.2.42
Bibliographic details
Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 49, 27 July 1908, Page 7
Word Count
353THE GREAT EASTERN. Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 49, 27 July 1908, Page 7
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