OCR Text |
Show Hoi Crew Die As Vessel Hits Rock and Sinks Vorst Disaster on Great Lakes in Five Years; Probe Ordered. FORT WILLIAM, ONT. Twelve members of the crew, including three women, perished when the fog-beset Canadian freighter Emperor Em-peror rammed into Lake Superior rocks and sank in the worst disaster disas-ter on the Great Lakes in five years. Twenty-one survivors were pluck- ed from overturned and sinking lifeboats or from the cold rocks oft lonely Isle Royale, a United States national park jutting up in bleak Lake Superior 48 miles from the tip of northern Michigan. The vessel, one of about 75 operated oper-ated by Canada Steamship Lines, normally carried a crew of 35, but two men remained behind when the ship left Port Arthur, Ont. The body of a woman cook, Mrs. Edna Schultz, of Owen Sound, Ont., was recovered before coast guard ships and planes launched a search for the other 11 victims. Describes Scene. Capt. Eldon Walkinshaw of Col-lingwood, Col-lingwood, Ont., 61-year-old veteran of 38 years on the lakes, was among those drowned. His first mate and second engineer went down with him. An unestimated number of the p victims were sucked down into the raging vortex of the sinking 7,000-ton 7,000-ton Emperor, which overturned one of two lifeboats attempting to clear the stricken vessel. An 18-year-old coal passer, Er- nest Albrecht, youngest of the survivors, sur-vivors, described the scene. "The ship gave a lunge and water came gushing over like a waterfall," water-fall," he said from his hospital bed. "The port lifeboat was thrown against a bulkhead, with several persons in it. "I thought my time had come . . . "The next thing I knew I was in the water, floating with the (life) Jacket. I couldn't swim in that water, it was so cold, so I drifted to an overturned lifeboat and hung on until I saw the coast guard cutter coming." Probe Is Ordered. The 525-foot Emperor, built In Collingwood in 1910, went down in about 50 feet of water. Survivors were brought 25 miles to Fort William by the coast guard cutter Kimball, after her routine ' mission to Isle Royale was interrupted inter-rupted by a distress signal crackling crack-ling through the crisp air at approximately ap-proximately 4:15 a. m. The Kimball picked up four men clinging to an overturned lifeboat and 10 others who huddled in a sec- 1 i Unlf filial uHtVi ufntpr Th( remaining seven were taken off Canoe Rock, one and one-half miles off the northeastern tip of Isle Royale. Not since 1942, when 25 persons drowned in the sinking of a launch in Georgian bay, 14 in a tug disaster dis-aster and 18 in a Lake Erie barge, had the Great Lakes exacted such a toll. It was the first loss of life on Lake Superior since the steamer Arlington foundered in a gale in 1940 with one death. Cause of the collision was not Immediately Im-mediately determined. The attorney general of Ontario directed the Fort William coroner to investigate. |