DEATH ROLL OF 200

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LII, Issue 17156, 5 October 1926, Page 7

DEATH ROLL OF 200

INEXPERIENCED PILOT BLAMED. KRONSTADT, Russia, Aug. 31. Estimates of the loss of life in the sinking of the steamer Burevestnik continue to grow. It is reported now thatmore than 200 of the 563 passengers aboard were drowned in the foundering of the craft off the exit of the ship canal oa Sunday night. The little island fortress is plunged into deep sorrow, as most of the victims were residents. They were mostly workmen -and their families returning from a holiday in Leningrad. Scarcely a family on the island escaped loss. Up to noon to-day more than thirty bodies had been recovered from the sunken wreck. The vessel, leaving Leningrad, had just emerged from the ship canal in a thinck fog, when, a German freighter loomed out of the dark. To avoid the collision the Russian ship was turned sharply, and crashed into a stone pier, ripping a great hole in her bow. She sank in less than fifteen minutes, and in the fog and darkness the work of rescue was greatly hampered. The regular captain was not on board, and the first officer, an inexperienced pilot, who was in charge, saved himself, but his wife and two children perished. They were locked in a cabin, the key to wheh the officer carried in his pocket. Investigations shows that only one lifeboat and 172 lifebelts were carried. "When the vessel crashed into the pier sailors rushed below quieting the passengers with cries of '"There is no danger." Most of the passengers then returned to (heir cabins, where they were when the inrushing water overwhelmed the craft. In the -wild panic that follwed passengers clambered frantically up the slender mast of the steamer, which collapsed under their weight. A great mob rushed for the single boat that the German freighter sent to the rescue, and it sank under the numbers that jumped into it;