ROAMING THE WIDE SEAS OVER. DERELICTS DRIFT HUNDREDS OF MILES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2374, 31 August 1899, Page 55

ROAMING THE WIDE SEAS OVER. DERELICTS DRIFT HUNDREDS OF MILES.

Only seafaring folk can adequately realise what a peril is found in the' derelict »hips that drift about on the high seas. A captain in tbe merchant service recently gave some interesting particulars on the subject to the writer. "No systematic effort can be made," he u&id, "to deal with derelicts, but it is an understood thing amongst all civilised nations that their warships shall destroy or sink abandoned vessels whenever they are met with. " But even < then it is no easy matter to dispose of derelicts.' There is a sort of perversity about them. They are the hardest of all vessels to sink or destroy. One of our warships some time ago across a drifting hulk in the Red Sea, and started firing upon it. It actually required, I am told, 162 shot's to sink it. "How. do they become derelict? In a. variety of ways. X will give y»u a few instances in point. One vessel, a Russian wheat ship, that is still drifting about somewhere, hag a weird history. The yellow fever broke out on board, destroying all the orew but one man, the second mate, who escaped in the ship's jolly-boat and reached land after frightful sufferings. " Another, a clipper ship, sprang a bad leak. Finding it impossible to cope with the inrush of water, the crew took to tl'j

boats. But somehow the ship did not link. She was heard of several times afterwards. One dark night » schooner ran into her, and became a total wreck. "■ A sailor belonging to the schooner .saved himself by jumping on board the derelict, where ha remained for two weeks drifting abont the ocean. Fortunately for him there were plenty of provisions on board, and he lived well until he was taken off by a passing steamer which observed his signals of distress. Having neither time nor the means to destroy tke derelict, the captain of the steamer was compelled to let it drift, and it is probably still floating about in some part of the world. " Another abandoned vessel tltat was for a long time a danger 'to navigation was a Danish brig which oaught fir« somewhere up in the Orkneys. " She was burned nearly to the water's edge,, the crew being rescued by another vessel which happened, fortunately, to be iD the neighbourhood. "This hulk was seen many times, once off Cape Finisterre, another time off .the Cape Verde Islands. One of her aimless voyages must have' actually 'taken ' her through the Straits of Dover. After nearly wrecking a collier steamer which come into collision with her, I am glad to say that ■she- was sunk by a French gunboat, which came across her in the Bay of Biscay. " Just now the captains of the big Atlantic liners are on the look-out for an abandoned Norwegian barque. Becoming waterlogged, she was deemed to be sinking, and the crew took to the boats, they might more profitably have remained on board, for the ship eventually did not sink, and was last seen in mid-Atlantic, where she may, one fine day (or night), send some good steamer to the bottom. " I have not the least doubt that a good many mysterious of ships are due to their colliding with these floating wrecks. But as I said before, it is impossible to devise any plan by which this particular peril can be guarded against, for while vessels from time to time report having sighted drifting hulks, it is a hopeless task to try to fix their position, for they drift for hundreds of miles. " Derelict steamers are rare as compared with sailing ships; moreover, they are not so erratic in their courses when they get adrift, and being so much more valuable, attempts are generally made to save instead of to destroy them."