SHIPPING DISASTER.

Poverty Bay Herald, 17 April 1906, Page 4

SHIPPING DISASTER.

STEAMER FOUNDERS IX ATLANTIC (Per s.s. Sierra at Auckland.) SAN FRANCISCO, March 25. A despatch from. .Boston, March 14, says:— Suffering, mental and physical, and numerous acts of heroism in saving life, have rarely equalled in the records of tragedies of the sea that which attended the loss of the Phoenix line steamer British King, which on Sunday last in an Atlantic storm foundered about 150 miles south of Sable Island, and carried to death twenty-seven members of the crew. Tliirteen were rescued from the sinking vessel by the Leyland liner Bostonian, bound from Manchester to Boston, and eleven by the tank steamer Mannhein, from Rotterdam to New York. Five others, who had been drawn into the vortex when the British King sank, were picked up by the Bostonian from a frail oit of wreckage they had grasped after i desperate struggle in the whirlpool. Captain Jas. O'Lagon, of the British Aing, died aboard the Bostonian from injuries sustained in. trying to save the iiip. . The rescued brought here include tae second officer, chief engineer, f mirth engineer, steward, and a number of coal passers and sailors, mostly Belgians, and one stowaway from New York. Two lifeboats of the Bostonian were crushed; and the volunteer crews were thrown into the high-running seas while engaged in Che work of rescue, but all safely reached . the steamer again. They were rescued 1 by lines thrown from their own steamer. ! A second boatload of rescuers was thrown into the sea, and only rescued after an hour's work by their comrades. The British King sailed from New York for Antwerp on March 7, with a miscellaneo\is caxgo and 151- cattle. Previoiio to the appearance of the rescuing steamers every small boat of the British King had been demolished, and there was no vjay of escape. The vessel was owned by the British Shipowners Company, of Liverpool. .