TERRIBLE TALE OF THE SEA

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2790, 31 May 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

TERRIBLE TALE OF THE SEA

A remarkable story of the sea comcs from St. Malo, the narrator being an ancient mariner named Bauche, whose painful experiences in a small boat on the ocean ought to be a warrant for the truth of his tale. Bauche had signed articles with the captain of the vessel called the Mathilde, in which he exiled to Martinique. _ While in the harbour of St. Pierre iu a boat with the cabin boy one day lie was driven oceanwards by a gale of wind, and was knocking about for a week on the waves before he was rescued by a Norwegian barque. After the first night at sea, Bauche says that the cabin boy became partly delirious, water was filling the boat every instant, and in order to prevent the dying lad from being drowned in it the old sailor made pails of the legs of his pantaloons, and was thus enabled to keep the bottom of the little craft tolerably dry. He had also to deprive himself of his shirt, which he utilised as a flag of distress. On the third day the cabin boy died, and hardly was tha breath out of his body before seven or eight ferocious black sharks began to circle round the boat, which they sometimes almost touched. Rather than delived up the dead body, to the monsters of the deep, Bauche kept it until it became decomposed. Being afraid of illness, he at length threw it overboard, after haviDg said his prayers over it, and the prey was ppeedily seized by the sharks, who disappeared with it, and did not show up again for about twenty-four hours or so, Bauche now felt so utterably miserable that he was thinking of throwing himself overboard, _ when he was dissuaded from his intention by the reappearance of the sharks, who after eyeing him ravenously for some time, actually began to gambol before him, as if in anticipation of a good feel off his body. •' I did not want to be eaten alive, " remarked Bauche, in his narration of his perilous adventures, " so I remained where I was and waited assistance." On the seveuth day the sailor lost consciousness, fell down in the boat, and was rescued insensible condition by Captain Padersen, of the Waldimir. In his mouth the Norwegian sailors found what they first thought was an old quid of tobacco, but which proved to be part of the horn handle of a knife, which Bauche was crunching to stave off hunger when he became unconscious. The rescued sailor, after having been taken to New Orleans, obtained a passage home to St. Malo. Only the other day he went down to the port to meet his old shipmates of the Mathilde, who had been wrecked off the coast of Newfoundland, whither they hud made another voyage since Bauche disappeared at Martinique. The crew of the Mathilde had been rescued off the banks of Labrador by a English vessel. They had long, of course, given up Bauche and the cabin boy as lost in mid ocean, and great was their surprise when they beheld the former in the flesh, and as hale and hearty as if he had never been without food on the deep for full seven days in an open boat, and in perilous contiguity to the teeth of the tigers of the ocean.