STORY OF SEA HORROR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 109, 11 May 1931, Page 11

STORY OF SEA HORROR

RAVAGED BY YELLOW FEVER. CHEW DIE ONE BY ONE. ►Second Mate B. Jorgensen, last survivor of the voyage of death made forty years ago by the Guiding Star, that tragic ship which drifted in the Eastern seas with a crew of dead men, has just celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. The story of one of the most remarkable adventures of the sea ever recorded was told by Mr. Jorgensen recently to the Johannesburg correspondent of the Daily Express. ‘‘The Guiding Star,” Mr. Jorgensen said, “sailed from Tasmania for South America in 1888. At Santos we found more than fifty ships of all nationalities laid up None of them had a crew’, for the yellow fever had seized Santos, and half the people there were dead or dying. There was no labour to be had. Everyone was down with fever, and the skipper detern*ncd to get out. “We rounded the Cape of Good Hope in twenty-three days, and so up the Indian Ocean till we were 500 miles from Java. And then two of our crew of eleven became sick. Next day they were both dead. The following day a third man went delirious ami leaped overboard. We knew then that the yellow fever was aboard, and that death stared us all in the face. There was no wireless in those days no one to help. “Within twenty-four hours the skipper and the first mate both sickened and were dead before night fell. Three others were moaning in their bunks, the next day they all died. The three that were left were sick. They were the cook, a Frenchman, Charley Whitley, a Londoner, and myself. “Four days passed like that. At night I used to crawl up to the poop and lie there, wondering if I would die before the others. And on the fifth morning, as I lay there at daybreak, half delirious, I heard a hail from overside. “It was the American barque Lancefield. They sent over medicine and provisions and put on board their officer and three men to take us into Batavia. We all began to recover. “But in Batavia, the American chief and the three men who had brought us to safety went down and die d. ” _ _____