SOVIET IDEAS AT SEA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19762, 8 October 1927, Page 13

SOVIET IDEAS AT SEA.

NAVIGATION BY COMMITTEE. A practical demonstration of the Russian Communist theories in the management of a ship at sea was recently reported in the Times by Dr. Thomas Wood, who gathered the facts during a visit to a small port 16 miles from the North Cape, where he saw the vessel concerned. It was then being refitted. She was running north in the early summer to the White Sea, when the ship's company decided that they had lost faith in the captain's seamanship and formed a " committee of navigation." The committee sat, but agreed so ill that it had to signal for a pilot to take charge. Ho was on his way to the ship when her people saw (for the first time, so far as one can gather) that she was dangerously close" in-shore. The current swung her bows round, and in broad daylight, in calm weather, she took the ground outside the harbour. There sh6 was during the summer, till a salvage vessel towed her off last July. " In this instance it is a little difficult to extend the sympathy one usually feels for the victims of marine disaster," Dr. Wood remarked. "My informants made no attempt to do so. This method of navigation, with its strong flavour of opera comique, along that merciless coast, was regarded by them simply with professional amusement; they said, with tolerant contempt, that this waa the kind of thing they have learned to expect from Russia nowadays."