IN THE JAWS OF DEATH.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1401, 8 September 1923, Page 7

IN THE JAWS OF DEATH.

A REAL LIFE STORY. (E. A. Ashton, in The Sunday Express) At the invitation of a friend I spent the autumn of 1921 cruising in the northern seas off Greenland. It was a new experience to me. I had never imagined anything so beautiful, or so desolate, as those empty plains of ice stretching away to the Jiorizon. One fine September day we sailed up a great clhannel about a mile broad in the Lincoln Sea. The water shone a frosty blue in the sun, and the air, though cold, was invigorating; it ,-was good to be alive. For about an hour and a half we went steadily ahead when suddenly my host Quay, who had been looking intently through his binoculars for some time, muttered an oath, and rushed below. Lifting my own glasses, I looked towards the horizon. At first, all I could see was a broad stretch of water, with a line bright in the sun marking the ice edge on either side; but as I strained my eyes to the utmost, the stretch of water seemed to grow almost imperceptibly narrower. The horrible truth flashed on me. We had sailed unawares into the jaws of an enormous death trap. The ice was on the move; unless we could get out of the channel in time we should be smashed to matchwood. I suddenly felt helpless, and very afraid; we were up against a natural force with which no man could cope; the speed of the ship was the only thing that could save us. The engines were reversed, the little vessel quivered from stem to stern, swung round, and then began the race with deatih back to the open sea. The wind screamed past, lashing us with icy spray; every bolt in the sh-.p groaned with the strain. Below deck, dripping with sweat, the men fed the now white hot furnaces, and still came the inexorable demand for "More steam!"

We could hear dull roar after dull roar like distant artillery, as the great jaws of ice crashed together with ever increasing speed. They were only half a mile apart, now, where we were. I imagined myself at the end, crushed into a shapeless mass of quivering flesh, or drowning in the blackness down there under the ice, scratching, clawing at it. Ghastly! Then, "The sea!" I yelled; but Quay, grey faced, whispered, "Can we make it?" The sea ahead, the ship flying like an arrow from the bow, and the white death on three sides closing in on us. I tried to pray, but the worlß died in my throat, I could only watch fascinated, that narrowing angle of water—only sixty feet wide, now fifty, forty, thirty—even as I screamed the ship seemed to leap forward, and a crack like the crack of doom rent the heavens as the ice banks smashed together with awful force. Everything went round me for a minute. When I came to, the ship was tossing like a cork on the great waves caused by the impact, and Quay, reeling like a drunken man, was stupidly muttering, "My God! Oh, my God!" Behind us was no trace of the great channel up which we had sailed—nothing but. mile upon lonely mile of ice hills glistening coldly in the sun as before. On the way back to Smith Sound, about a week later, we saw, embedded in a great iceberg, the pulverised remains of what had once been a ship. There was no trace of life anywhere. That ship might have been ours. Sad at heart, Ave left it, a shattered mast standing out gaunt amid the empty leagues of ice.