VAMPIRES OF THE OCEAN.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13277, 30 November 1911, Page 4

VAMPIRES OF THE OCEAN.

Tho United States Government wages systematic war on ono of the deadliest perils of tho ocean, the derelict. A derelict-destroying vessel, the Seneca, is apparently kept continually employed hunting down these wandering foes of shipping, and & writer in an American paper says that in her short life of three years shelias done more for the safety of shipping than all the other agencies. The chances of a reported derelict escaping the destroyer aro very small, once the latter gets on he rtrack, and with the extension of wireless telegraphy they will become smaller, still. But some two hundred and thirty derelicts are reported every year, and even a professional hunter like the Seneca can only dispose of a tithe of them. Som« derelicts aro astonishingly tenacious of life. The American schooner Alma Cummings was caught in a blizzard in February, 1896, and battered to a shapeless hulk ju a few hours. Her captain decided to abandon her. Before leaving, he ignited the cargo. But the cargo was waterlogged, and the fire died out, and the Cummings started off on a 6000 mile jaunt that took her almost to the coast of England. Thep she veered south-wester-ly, and finally, eighteen months after sho was abandoned, sjie struck San Bias Island, near Colon, Panama, Jji the course of the voyage, she was boarded seven times and set on firo seven times, but although she was burned to the water's edge, she keps afloat. Another schooner of the Cummings family made in authenticated drift of 9000 miles, and then disappeared. Abandoned sfceamers do not usually float for long, but one, a trim British cargo boat, floundered about for three months in tho track of Transatlantic shipping. In that time twenty-two steamers sighted her, and more than once those keeping watch at night on a liner tearing along at twenty knots an hour, shivered as they flew past the partially sufimergeci mass. Several mysteriouß disappearances, such as that of the Narmis, a new and powerful steamer, aro attributed to collisions w|tji fchege vampires of tho ocean. Most derelicts are lumber vessels. Lumber vessels take in water to their full capacity after they spring a Jrak, and then simply drift along buoyed up by the mass of swollen, water-soaked material in their holds.