NIGHTMARE IN THE PACIFIC.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 April 1934, Page 10 (Supplement)

NIGHTMARE IN THE PACIFIC.

SAILING INTO FIELD OF PUMICE. An old master mariner living at Auckland has been telling of one of the strangest adventures he has had during a long career at sea. During the summer of 1918 he was at sea in a sailing cutter and for a night and a day saw not a sign of the water on which the ship floated. Let the .ancient mariner tell his own story. We were halfway across from Niuafoou to Vavau in the Tonga Islands, and were fining about seven knots with a northwest breeze, when we ran info discoloured water with fine pumice floating on the surface. The vessel gradually slowed down, although the wind was still blowing as fresh as earlier in the day. It was pitch dark and the smell of sulphur ant. steam was suffocating. We were embedded in a thick field of pumice, and there were boulders of it towering above the deck rail. ' It was a weird experience. The sight that met our eyes at daybreak will never be forgotten by anyone on board. The cutter was lying absolutely still, though with a fresh breeze in her sails. There was quite a hill of pumice under the vessel’s bows as well as big pumice boulders on all sides. A man who went aloft could see no

' sign of water, proving that the field ’of floating pumice was at least 30 miles round, due to one of those strange volcanic disturbances not uncommon in the Pacific, where islands have been known to rise out of the depths and then disappear again as if by magic. As we had no chance of making progress through the field we managed, after much difficulty, to get the cutter turned round, and’ sailed out the way we had entered, clearing the field about dusk, completing our voyage to Tonga without further incident after making a wide detour. When tlie cutter got clear the copper on the ship’s bottom was scoured as bright as a new saucepan, for every housewife knows that pumice, which is really frothly lava cooled down, is one of the best cleaning stuffs there is. QUIETER TRAINS. On the New York subways five cars have been put into service provided with noise-deadening devices. These cars are to be watched for two months to see whether the public take to the idea of travelling noiselessly. It is claimed that 90 per cent of the oidinary noise is done away with. The cost of transforming an old car into a noiseless one is about sixty pounds.