A WRECK STORY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1211, 21 August 1911, Page 5

A WRECK STORY.

THE TOLL OP NEGLECTED DUTY. Yesterday a storv of the sea was related by Chief-Petty-Officer Welsh, of H.M.S. Challenger, who was speaking at the Wellington City Men's Brotherhood anniversary celebrations. He wished to illustrate how important to life aad safety it was that people should be vigilant and do their duty. "A few years ago," he said, "I was spoamng with an old friend of mine. Ho was a survivor of a vessel that foundered in thc\Bay of Biscay in the year 1891. Ho told mo the story of that awful night —how, when from stem to stem the crash was heard, the 300 men aboard became conscious that something serious had happened; how he saw everyone of his shipmates swept away in tho boiling surf; ™ ? alone was left clinging to the lifeboat; how the morning broke upon • n lirnhs twice their normal eize through bruises and tho action of the enlt water upon them; how he scrambled across the rocks and through the water t thought was the main land, and to his surprise ho found when he got there tha} those three hundred men had gone down to a watery grave within sight a kP aDl sh Coastguard station, and ■the Coastguards knew nothing about it. 1 hev should have known, but thost* who should have been making, a personal and Christian sacrifice, knew nothing oPthe distress signals from that ill-fated vessel, and three hundred men had gone to a grave in the sea when they might have someone had been doing his