COLLISION WITH AN ICEBERG.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 9307, 16 September 1893, Page 2 (Supplement)

COLLISION WITH AN ICEBERG.

EXCITING EXPERIENCE ON THE BARQUE CASHMERE. A few weeks ago the English barque Cashmere arrived in New York from Pisagua, Chili, after a lengthy passage of 204 days. Tho master of the vessel, Captain Thompson, gives tho following accounb of a collison with an iceberg : — " We set sail on January 2 with a welltrimmed cargo. The wind was all right, I had a good crew, and everything wont well. We rounded tho Cape on February 28, and as we came on tho easterly side we ran into a thin mist and met with a few small icebergs. I didn't worry much about the ice, because 1 had been around the Horn twenty times, and had seen lots of it. That day a young Swedo fell overboard, and though wo hove to and lowered the boats, we failed to pick him up. A SEA OF ICE. "Well, the ice began to crow more plentiful as we moved along, and in a couple of days we ran across more bergs than I ever saw in the Southern seas before. "I decided to pub extra men on watch, and I rigged out Third Mate Ponteb with my marine glasses when I pub him on the lookout on the evening of March 1. We were about three hundred miles off the Falkland Islands ab that time. " With the extra lookout and the watch alert we crashed into a berg at ten o'clock that night. The Cashmere is an iron ship of 1200 tons. The bowsprit is in* two sections, composed of hollow steel twentyfour inches in diameter at the base. Well, sir, tho forward section of the bowsprit was just telescoped into the other part, and then the whole thing was jabbed right into tho forward bulkhead and clean through to tho hold. Our deck beams were broken, and the timbers were ripped up. "The ice thab was broken away by the force of the collision came tumbling down on tho forward deck in massive chunks until ib was pilod high above tho bulwarks, and tho vessel looked as if she was a turtle back. The deck slopes back a good deal toward the stern, and immense pieces of ice ; rolled down off the heap and slid right along ' the alleys on the porb and starboard sides until they struck the stern rail and careened over into the water. HAD A NOVEL RIDE. " The sailor men who were asleep in the deck-house grabbed their clothes and sea boots and rushed out. One of them, known only as Dutch Albert, was struck by one of these big hunks of ice, and ho was lifted on top in some way. He passed us on his strange seat with one hand holding his sea boots and his other grasping his hair. "The wind coming around the berg formed a sort of eddy, and drove us against the monster a second time, bub the impact then was light, and we suffered no injury. We sheered off a bib with the rebound, and I had a chance to size up the berg. " It was easily three times higher than the truck of our mainmast. Thab would leave ib about eight, hundred feet above water. It was shaped for all the world like the head and neck of a colossal crane. Well, sir, we just cub right under that overhanging break of the bird-like berg, and as we passed under the keel grated on the projecting part and listed us to starboard. " As soon as we got clear I had soundings made and the pumps examined. We made no water, though some of our plates were strained. Our collison bulkheads held out in great shape. " We floundered around in a region of icebergs for eight days. On March 9in the afternoon it began to rain. I saw deliverance near, for rain in that section is usually followed by a south-wesb wind. Sure enough the wind came up, and we made Rio Janeiro on May 28."