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Show SEAL H0MMTCES OF THE SEA hv GEORGE JEAtf "NATHAN res sea fir "' ' i 3RGE JEANNATHAN ; ;j Ridge way Company.) f V ' V ' ;.' . , - : " D away In the records - j f; af!; vv.- ' ' ' ' ' - "? " the American Sea- lA--f -3 f ,. .. -s -;-(s-: " 's society, the writer pi tJJ . f ntly discovered a re- r .-; "fsj - made by the Cap- ' fit ' of the bark Anjou ( A f " 39 tons) upon his ar- .'Sit1 ' SVSv;-'', .:l ' '"v. -j . - 1 In Marseilles sJwbw.w "LAET'?' -,--' .-wuWw.jtTJ ird the liner Ernest V J' - , , -v ;rlous disappearance ' &' ,v , -, :he earth for a period - " t he reappeared. Dur- . "S nVrt , v! t only had all trace - Z . " mself been lost, but, ' U "t v . ' . . -so u with her crew and tS t ario-llke repdrt, una- r 'i-v - rtf,S , a - ollows in the cap- " 4$?, s ' ' ; , ) die on a voyage from ,fT-'. " ' nth was wrecked on - I the Dundee ship Humay and group in the Pa- V . oon, bound from Scotland X'X? t0 Valparaiso The cargo Sr lr k ot h Humayoon was al o Ai'Zj' tJ' coal and when the vessel t!:V rea?,h Cape Horn, the "Bates hoc- SsjfS s J and kerosene. When the vessel reach- doo" as sailors always called it got jtsstm ed latitude 41 south, longitude, 13 'f 'ts work again and the ship went up ' iSasas-BrfSi east, off Cape of Good Hope, on Sep- in flames. Mrs. Bates and the others (Copyright, by the Rldgeway Company.) 7 BURIED away In the records of the American Seamen's Sea-men's society, the writer ' recently discovered a re- I L port made by the Cap- Sjj' tain of the bark Anjou (2.0C9 tons) upon his ar- rival In Marseilles aboard the liner Ernest Simons In 1906. After a mysterious disappearance from the face of the earth for a period of many months, he reappeared. During Dur-ing this time not only had all trace of the captain himself been lost, but, alas, of the Anjou with her crew and twenty-five passengers. The scant, scenario-like repdrt, unadorned una-dorned further, follows In the captain's cap-tain's words: "The Anjou, while on a voyage from Sydney to Falmouth, was wrecked on one of the Auckland group in the Pacific. Pa-cific. Wo had left Sydney on January 20, and jZTZ A" during a thick C"!J -fog and rough weather on Feb- SU---4 ruary i the ship jim? The masts fell . and smashed some of the small boats, and there was a panic on board. "Fortunately all escaped in the boats that remained whole, but many were only partly dressed and some not at all. After a terrible experience in a heavy gale, lasting for almost a whole day, we reached the shore of one of the deserted islands the following afternoon aft-ernoon and, after a battle with the heavy sea, managed to drag our bodies up on to the land. ""Naked and wounded, for what clothes we had had been ripped off, our bodies torn and bruised hy being battered around, we looked like a band of phantoms marching on to the conquest con-quest of some infernal island. "Almost starved, we lighted a big fire with flint and attracted some sea-birds sea-birds which we captured and ate. Making Mak-ing clothes for ourselves out of long grass and leaves, we started out to explore ex-plore the island. After a search that lasted three days, some of our party discovered a rude shelter, showing that shipwrecked people had been there at some time before. "On the following days we killed, with rocks, a number of albatross and caught a quantity of shellfish, on which we subsisted. Also, we captured captur-ed a small seacow, which proved to be decent eating. "As a chance of making our condition condi-tion known, we caught three albatross alive and set them free with bark cards tied around their necks, stating our plight in French and English. But day after day passed and help failed to come. "We resolved to make the best cf our conditio, because we feared and rightly so that we might be left on theiisland for months, even years, before be-fore we could in some way or other attract the attention of a passing vessel. ves-sel. The vessels, we knew, gave the particular island we were on a very wide berth. "So we got up a little government all of our own and called ourselves the 'Ship-wrecked Kingdom.' We had a sort of king, or boss, a cabinet of advisors ad-visors and all that sort of thing. Our 'army' or exploration party was dispatched dis-patched into the interior of the' island and the 'army,' consisting of eight men, discovered some wild sheep. "On May 7, after we had been on the Island Kingdom for over three months, the New Zealand government steamer Hinomoa rescued us. This vessel had on board the two daughters of Mr. Mills, the New Zealand Minister Minis-ter of Commerce, who superintended most of the work of helping us back to our natural civilized state and, as a token of our gratitude, we gave them the cat that had been saved from the wreck of the Anjou and that had gone through all our troubles with us as mascot of our little Kingdom." At the end of the captain's report, there is the simple statement that ten large vessels before the Anjou had been wrecked at the same spot during fifteen years, among them the General Gen-eral Grant with a loss of seventy-five lives. And there are scores of true tales like this that have never come to the eyes of the great reading world, actual romances and dramas of the deep that rival the attempts of fiction. The Voyage of the Kerosene-Laden "Thornliebank." A ship's fight against a storm, made more exciting by the fact that some dynamite happens to be included in the cargo, is one of the favorite and stock devices of the sea-fiction writers. What would you think of a story concerning a leaking clipper ship, with eighty-six thousand cases of kerosene and benzine aboard, that went through wrecking storms, that was on the point of being smashed to pieces every other oth-er minute, and that was finally brought to port eight thousand miles away? She was saved only through the sleepless sleep-less efforts of her starved crew, who for two and one-half months guarded the shifting cargo against explosions night and day. The clipper Thornliebank, of Glasgow, Glas-gow, Captain Smith, left Philadelphia bound for Wellington, New Zealand, July 1, 1903. It carried a cargo of eighty-six thousand cases of benzine .. - j? -fry-- "i it- s; .y- ' :'...v;.- . V . - " H V? W r.v.-' and kerosene. When the vessel reached reach-ed latitude 41 south, longitude, 13 east, off Cape of Good Hope, on Sep- tember 9, it encountered a cyclonic storm of such unabating fury that for days the Thornliebank threatened to go under. As the storm worked Its havoc, the men were compelled to lash themselves them-selves to one another, after the fashion of Alpine climbers, to prevent their being be-ing sent overboard. Let us quote now from the plain, unvarnished record of the Thornlle-bank's Thornlle-bank's perilous trip. "In the evening the ship gave a sud-cen sud-cen lurch, plunged into the seas and for a moment was submerged from stem to stern. Every one on board thought she was foundering and the sailors dropped on their knees and prayed. . While the vessel was submerged, sub-merged, everything movable was washed wash-ed overboard. "After a fine struggle on the part of the men, Captain Smith succeeded in keeping the ship off befor .ie gale for safety, using oil from po-t and starboard star-board and thus diminishing the force of the gigantic waves. After a day filled with awful dread, the weather began be-gan to moderate and the ship was put on her course again. The officers noticed no-ticed soon after she had resumed her course that she was moving sluggishly, sluggish-ly, so the wells were sounded and it was found that there were eleven Inches of water below. "After' successfully battling with a terrific hurricane, to realize that death by drowning was still a matter of possibility pos-sibility nerved the crew to redouble their efforts to bring the vessel to a safe harbor. Slowly but surely the water was gaining. When the ship took the heavy plunge that carried away her deck-house and smashed several sev-eral skylights, she started some of her rivets. With the donkey-engine gone there was no other alternative than to use the hand pumps, and from that day, September 10, to November 29, they were kept going night and day-two day-two and a half months' of incessant pumping. "Not for an instant were the pumps allowed to remain idle. With half the crew below .decks working to keep the water down, the other half was laboring labor-ing above decks to bring the vessel to safe harbor. On November 6 the Thornliebank rounded the South Cape and the -course was' shaped for New Zealand." In other words, the sieve-like Thornliebank Thorn-liebank was brought by tireless and fighting seamanship to her destination after an eight thousand mile struggle with death. Here is another real tale of the sea. In actual sailor lore, they characterize the story as that of "The Fire Woman Wom-an of the Sea." The latter, concretely, was or rather is, for they say she is still alive at the age of eighty-four and living in Massachusetts Mrs. D. B. Bates, the widow x of a well-known American sea captain. She later married mar-ried Lieutenant James F. Hyde, of the United States army. For years there was a superstition among American seamen that whenever Mrs. Bates went to sea a hoodoo fire was sure to break out on the vessel that carried her. According to the chornicles of the American Seamen's society, Mrs. Bates had more narrow escapes from the hoodoo fi es that pursued her than Kate Claxton ever dreamed of. Mrs. Bates always went to sea with her captain-husband. Their first trip was made In 1S50, when her husband was In command of the Boston ship Nonantum. On July 27 Mrs. Bates left Baltimore on the Nonantum forSan Francisco. The ship's cargo was a thousand tons of coal and a huge quantity of provisions listed for Panama. When the Nonantum Nonan-tum reached the latitude of the Rio de la Plata flames broke out In the hold and for twelve whole days Mrs. Bates, her husband and the rest of the crew stuck to the burning hulk and, by fighting desperately with the fire, finally final-ly managed to bring the vessel to the Falkland Islands before the flames ate through its sides. A mile from shore the fire conquered the fighters and the Nonantum began to fall apart as all hands got clear in the small boats. After weeks of waiting, the party on the barren island were picked up by i I ibe Dundee ship Humay- , oon, bound from Scotland to Valparaiso. The cargo . of the Humayoon was also coal and. when the vessel reached Cape Horn, the "Bates hoodoo" hoo-doo" as sailors always called It got in its work again and the ship went up in flames. Mrs. Bates and the others on the ship were compelled to take to the small boats. The Liverpool ship Symmetry, bound to Acapulco, rescued them. It was learned that the Symmetry was laden with coal, as the other two ships had been, nnd Mrs. Bates and the sailors gathered on deck and offered up prayer pray-er that the "Bates hoodoo" wo-.ild pass them by this time. During the first three hours that Mrs. Bates was aboard nothing happened. hap-pened. But the crew of the Symmetry were so positive in their superstition that a fire would surely break out il she remained on the vessel, that Mrs. Bates and her husband were persuaded persuad-ed to transfer themselves to the Fan-chon, Fan-chon, that passed the Symmetry on its course to San Francisco. The Fan-chon, Fan-chon, Mrs. Bates learned to her horror, hor-ror, was also laden with coal. On Christmas night, several days later, when the Fanchon was twelve hundred miles from land, the usual hoodoo-fire came about as sure as fate. Half of the crew was quickly ordered to go below and fight the flames and Mrs. Bates, donning sailor's clothes, gave the men her assistance, remaining remain-ing below on watch for two days after aft-er the fire had been extinguished. Five days later the Fanchon struck the rocks of the Galapagos islands and Mrs. Bates was one of those who was hurled overboard by the shock of collision. col-lision. Three hours after she reached the shore her life having been saved by the merest chance the flames burst out on the Fanchon once mors and one hour later the vessel was a black ruin. After living for weeks as Crusoes on the island, the shipwrecked colony was rescued by a passing bark. Mrs. Bates was then transferred to the steamship Republic, carrying four hundred passengers. pas-sengers. Five days out, the old hoodoo hoo-doo again asserted itself. Another fierce flight with fire was in order, but this time with little damage. In short, fire followed Mrs. Bates as a shadow, not only for years on sea, but on land as well. Shortly after her arrival in San Francisco that city suffered suf-fered one its greatest conflagrations. Six months later the hotel in which Mrs. Bates was stopping in Marysville was destroyed by fire and Mrs. Bates narrowly escaped death. The records even show that in 1890, in Plymouth, Mass., the house in which she was living liv-ing burned and Mrs. Bates was nearly killed. Mrs. Bates, "the Are woman of the sea," is regarded by American sailors as the most extraordinary escapel from .death that they have ever encountered. en-countered. Four Strange Tales of the Sea. The sailors and records reveal hundreds hun-dreds of similar unknown sea tales of fact that vie with the fiction bookshelves. book-shelves. For instance, there is the story of a pitched battle that occurred in 1858 aboard one of the convict sailing ships bound for England to Australia, a battle bat-tle that lasted two whole days. ! There is the story of the captain of the bark L. A. Van Romondt, bound for Cuba from Nova Scotia. The captain cap-tain had just married a young girl iD Nova Scotia and thought the voyage to China would be his honeymoon trip. Before that honeymoon trip was ended, twenty-six days later, wrecks and transfers had placed the bride successively succes-sively on vessels carrying the Dutch, Cuban, Norwegian, American, Mexican and Italian1 flags. Then there is the story of the strand' ing of the U. S. S. Wateree, Captain L. G. Billings, U. S. N.', on August 8, 186S, by a Chilian earthquake; of the frightful battle with the huge guns that broke loose in the storm preceding pre-ceding the stranding and crashed back and forth across the decks; of the subsequent fight on the part of the officers to bring the panicky crew to discipline; and of the final carrying of the ship by the earthquake two miles inland and the depositing of the vessel at the base of a coast range of the Andes. As the sailors say, "All truth may not be stranger than fiction, but you can bet your marlin spike sea truth is!" What, would you say? |