MEN WITH CHARMED LIVES.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 50, 3 August 1908, Page 8

MEN WITH CHARMED LIVES.

It is curious how partial is fate as regards fatal accidents to individuals. One man ventures once in his life on a mountain climb, a bailloon ascent, or other more or less dangerous enterprise, and forthwith gets killed. Another spends years in courting a violent death, and dies in his bed at last.

Take, for example, the case of Captain Kindelan, the military aeronaut, who was discovered the other day by the master of the British ship ‘West Point' swimming about in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. He had leapt from the semi-submerged car of his derelict balloon to what looked like certain death, yet lived to tell the tale, as he had done—and this i 9 the extraordinary part of the affair—no fewer than thrice before under almost precisely similar circumstances.

Another remarkable case in point is that of Mr. George Albert Strachan, the only passenger who escaped absolutely unhurt from the terrible Salisbury railway accident of last year. In 1902 Mr. Strachan also got out scathless from the burning Iroquois Theatre, Chicago, when between eight and nine hundred lives were lost ; while four years before that he happened to be one of about half a dozen lucky ones saved from the steamship 'Portland,' sunk off Cape Cod in a terrific Atlantic gale, on which occasion 157 less fortunate people perished.

Still more remarkable was the case of a master mariner named Owen Richard, who died peacefully in his bed recently in his house in the East End of London, after having been nine times wrecked, three times rescued from burning ships, and once blown over a hundred feet into the air by the explosion of a cargo of gunpowder that killed no fewer than seventeen of his shipmate*.