WEALTH UNDER THE SEA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21723, 15 August 1932, Page 9

WEALTH UNDER THE SEA

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir,—A most interesting article in your issue,of Saturday, under the above heading, recalled bygone days in the tea clippers Your article begins: “Sunken wealth, which has long lam beneath the waters of Table Bay, Capetown, mil soon, it is expected, be reclaimed, for work has been begun by a salvage syndicate. The bottom of the sea there is strewn with wrecks. On the clippers homeward bound from India we used to make the land off the Cape about Port Elizabeth. A strong current rung there from the north-east to the south-west, and when a strong gaL is blowing from the south-west against the current the sea is very dangerous full of broken water. When I was an apprentice on the ship City of Delhi we had to heave-to one voyage with a howling gale blowing from the south-west. In the teeth of the gale we drifted four knots per hour round the Cape this giving an idea of the strength of the current that was setting south-west. Manners are well aware that a heavy gale blowing against a current always creates a heavy sea, or, in other words, high waves, with broken water, which is well known to be the most dangerous. Many a ship foundered theie in these circumstances. It was there tnat the Waratah came to grief, for, though her-doom is a mystery to landsmen, it is nothing of the sort to practical seamen.— I am, etc., Dog in the Manger. August 14. 1 (Our correspondent expounds his theory concerning the loss of the Waratah, but his speculations are discounted by the tact that, while he states that seamen on shore remarked the heavy angle at which she was rolling when she left Capetown she was actually on her way to C?rKd° wu ■when she was -wrecked. — Ed. U.iJ.x.j