POLAR BEAR ON A SHIP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18025, 25 February 1922, Page 2 (Supplement)

POLAR BEAR ON A SHIP.

W ; ♦ l ~ l I. FLUNG FROM ICEBERG, STRANGE RESULT- OF COLLISION. It is not uncommon for littlo craft moored in Indian rivers to find tigers climbing aboard, at nightj -but ships at sea do not expect such sudden 1 visitors. But it is the unexpected that happens, and an ocean-going ship has just received a guest quite as startling as a tiger, and probably twice as hungry. It was the crew of a steamship which put in for repairs at tho yard of tho Todd Shipbuilding Company in New York that told this strange tale. In making the North Atlantic passage the vessel ran into an impenetrable fog, and while this lasted there came a sudden crash, followed by the arrival on dock of a hundred tons of ico. In the gloom tho steamer had struck an uusecn iceberg, as the tragio Titanio did in tho samo ocean sorao years ago. Fortunately thero was no tragedy here; there was nothing worse than damage to the deck and bow. It was not a headon smash, nor had the iceberg a cutting prow beneath the water like that which tore open the Titanic. In any case, the injury to tho vessel was almost forgotten in an excitement followed. A grimy stoker popped up from the engine room to see what was happening,

and the officors on the ship's bridge suddenly saw this man racing at top speed along the deck as if a bear were after him. Had tho collision sent him mad? No, for there, sure enough and visible enough, a bear was after him!

A Polar bear was pursuing the stoker on tho deck ! A meteor or a thunderbolt could not have created, gnatcr astonishment. There was the ice-littered deck, and thcro wero tho stoker and the bear running frantically along it. Tho stoker won his race to safety, and tho bear became suddenly afraid. He halted, sniffed his way to tho side, clambered up, and dived into the sea to return to the iceberg from which he had come.

His sudden appearance out of the gloom and his sudden return'to it were as fantastic and incredible as anything in the story of the Flying Dutchman or the Ancient Mariner, but the explanation is simple enough. The bear was tho prisoner of the iceberg. How far it had carried him is not known, but it certainly had carried him, and at the moment of the collision ho' must have climbed no high up one of its sides that tho shock threw him bodily on to the deck of the ship.