SWEPT OUT TO SEA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22402, 24 April 1936, Page 9 (Supplement)

SWEPT OUT TO SEA

SEVEN LADS ON AN ICE-FLOE EARLY this year when the Arctic Circle seemed to bo spreading southward, to take in half of North America, seven boys had an experience on the eastern coast like that suffered by Polar explorers. The boys, while on a week-end holiday in Massachusetts, set out to walk over the frozen salt water at the edge of Cape Cod Bay, intending to reach Provineetown on the tip of Cape Cod. They were in sight of the shoro when the ice broke up, and were carried by the current nut to sea on a huge floe us big as a football ground. Their plight was seen from the land and coastguard vessels tried to reach them. But the tide had broken up the shoreward ice into many other smaller floes, and. though the coastguards persevered till dusk, these floes prevented all attempts at rescue. Night fell and the big floe with the boys on it drifted out of the bay. The wind was rising. Aeroplanes were sent with flares and circled round and about the bay, but could find neither the boys nor the fion One reason for the failure of the search was that the big floe broke in two. Five of the boys clung to the smaller piece in acute danger of slipping off. The other two boys were better off for room, but they also were in desperato straits. Other floes were bumping into them, and safety seemed very far off. They froze in an icy blast not many degrees above zero. One boy's feet were frozen where he crouched. But when daylight came an aeroplane sighted both floes. 30 miles out at sea. On one of them the boys had build a makeshift ice-house, or igloo, for shelter. The aeroplane led the way for a patrol boat equipped as an icebreaker which forced its way through the broken ice until the floes with their unwilling voyagers were only 200 yards away. The big cutter could go no nearer, but two small boats manned with oars steered a way through the small floes and took the boys off. Except for the boy with frozen feefc they were none the worse for their 22hours' ordeal.