SAVED FROM THE SEA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9154, 8 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

SAVED FROM THE SEA.

THE STRANGE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED TRAVELLER.

A gentleman who Ims been a pi-eat traveller and has visited nearly every portion of the globe has been spending a few weeks in Nashville. Like most great travellers, he is a fluent talker and a boon companion. Among other friends whom he made here was a young business man who has a store on one of the business thoroughfares of the city and lives with his mother, a widow a little past the middle age, in a pretty cottage in one of the suburbs of Nashville. The young man was much taken with Ins new acquaintance, who, one afternoon, aftei having refused st?vei'«tl former in\ it4ifciotis»j consented to go home with him to supper. As the young man, his mother, who is an invalid, and the stranger sat on the portico after supper chatting quietly, the young man incidentally reminded his mother of some of his schoolboy pranks, which he said occurred while he was at school in Haiti more, before his parents had returned from a residence of ten years in Australia. The stranger remarked that he once lived at Melbourne, Australia, and after an interesting conversation with the lady and her son about points in the antipodes familiar to them all, said that he had a peculiar experience on his :iv home. On being pressed to tell the story by his young friend, ho said : "That was some ten years ago. I was quite a young man, though having just served a term in the British army, in which 1 enlisted when a mere boy, and was on my way home to Liverpool. " We had been a few days out from Australia when a storm came up and our ship struck a hidden rock and began to till with water. We saw there was nothing to do but to take to the boats, which we did pell-mell, without much regard to good breeding or etiquette, each fearing that he would get left. There were three ladies on the ship, and I noticed as our boat was about to pull out one of them was left. I called the captain's attention to it, but he said our boat already had enough on her to sink her, and ordered the oarsmen to do their work I was a big, strapping, goodnatured fellow, and hated to see the poor woman leftwho, by the way, seemed a lady—and so I caught, hold of the side of the ship and held on till the lady was within a few feet of us, when she fell in a swoon. I jumped to her side, seized her in my arms, and sprang back on the boat just as it was separating from the sinking ship for t he last time. " The captain was so angry with me that he shot at me twice with a pistol, one ball missing me entirely and the other just grazing my knee. There was no good blood, between the captain and mo after that; but it was no time for fighting, as shortly afterwards the breakers overturned our boat while passing over a reef trying to make our way to a little coral island. 1 was a splendid swimmer, and soon found myself on shore alone. The only human beings in sight were a man swimming bravely for the island and the lady whom I had rescued from the ship clinging helplessly to a fragment. of the ship. The man was soon by my side, though in a state of utter exhaustion, and 1 concluded as I had saved the lady's life once I'd try and do so again. Acting upon the impulse, I swam out to where she was, and finally succeeded in getting her to land in an unconscious state. She came to, but her reason had deserted her. and she was a wild, raving maniac. " There was no fresh water on the island, which was very small, and no vegetables and but little grass, but there were lots of cocoanut trees full of cocoanut and alive with monkeys. I ate a cocoanut and drank the milk and got some for the lady and my companion, who had succeeded in getting to shore. He was taken suddenly ill from taking too much salt, water into his stomach, and died the second day after we were wrecked. I buried him in the sand and made a little house out of cocoanut leaves for the lady, but she was so crazy she would not stay in it. and would not eat any--1 thing. She would run about the island and scratch and hurt herself, till finally I. caught her and tied her up with ropes made of bark. We stayed on the island nine weeks, and I kept, her tied up most of the time and fed on cocoanut till finally she began to get fat. I used to climb trees after cocoanuts, but I got terribly tired eating them, and used to divert myself trying to catch a monkey. 1 wanted to try a piece of roasted monkey, but I could never get hold of one. " I knew the island was on the road taken by ships from Melbourne to New York, and that it was only a question of a short, time till we would be picked up; but I can promise you that it seemed to me like an ago before one came near enough to be hailed.

" At last a ship came by and took us on board. When we reached New York the lady was still a maniac, and I have never heard of her since, except through a friend of mine, who wrote to me about six months ago from Philadelphia that, he had heard from her, and that she was alive and well, and living with her husband in Washington cit.v."

The young man and his mother had listened to the stranger's story with breathless attention, and, when he had finished, told him that the lady was a sister to his host's mother, and was, at the time of the shipwreck, returning from a visit to her in Australia. They further told him that the lady had not regained her mind for a year after she came back to America, and that then she had no remembrance of anything that occurred after she left Australia. She is now the mother of three children and the wife of a high Government official.—Nashville paper.