NOT FIRED UPON

Southland Times, Issue 21580, 18 December 1931, Page 7

NOT FIRED UPON

SUNKEN LIQUOR BOAT

SURPRISING STATEMENT AT INQUIRY WRECK OF THE VENUS (United Press Assn.—By Telegraph —Copyright.) Odo, December 15. When the inquiry into the loss of the Venus, which was engaged in ruin-running, opened at Maaloey, Walter Denis Savage, surviving first officer, caused a surprise by declaring that she was neither chased nor fired upon. She left Rotterdam on November 5 and Lerwick on December 1. Thereafter she cruised in the North Sea. The captain alone determined the course and nobody else participated in the navigation. The vessel, for all the crew knew, might have been off Iceland and not Norway when she was wrecked. They carried 1800 two-gallon cans of liquor, none of which was discharged prior to the wreck. The Lerwick excise officers’ seal thereon was not broken- until half-an-hour before the foundering, when the cans were emptied and used for floats and the construction of rafts.

The captain ordered five men to take to the lifeboat and row to a lighthouse. They had not sufficient lifebelts and were drowned when the boat capsized. Two rafts supporting four men each were made in desperate haste. The captain had ordered the anchor to be dropped to check the vessel’s drift, but this did not hold and the Venus continued to drift shoreward broadside on, struck a rock, heeled over and flung the remainder of the crew into the water. Savage and a fireman, Davidson, seized the same piece of wreckage, but could not help the captain and engineer to keep afloat close by. Savage declared that his memory was a blank after he was thrown into the water.

It was previously reported that the Venus sank after an encounter with a customs boat.