SAVED BY THE NIAGARA

Evening Star, Issue 19782, 4 February 1928, Page 21

SAVED BY THE NIAGARA

MOTOR SCHOONER ON FIRE AH HEROIC ISLANDER SAN FRANCISCO, January 6.' Snatched from the shadow of death after a futile battle against flames which destroyed the motor schooner, Doris Crane, far out in the South Seas, officers of the British vessel arrived in San Francisco to tell of their almost miraculous rescue through the chance passing of a New Zealand liner. The blazing craft in the dark of the night attracted the attention of the mail steamer Niagara, thirty-five miles away, and the white officers and nine native members of the crew were saved. The Doris Crane sank, the funeral pyre of a South. Sea Islander who lost his life battling the flames. “We were at breakfast on December 19, nine days out from Fanning Island, when we heard an explosion,” said Captain Hiram C. Davison. “A can of gasoline had capsized in the engine room, and t,he whole place became a mass of flames. Two native oilers, Inaibo and Rerei, were inside, and I don’t see how they ever got out. Inaibo, a, barefoot savage islander, was a liero. His own leg badly burned, he struggled out on deck, dragging poor Rerei, who died shortly afterward. “We had no, wireless, and were 340 miles from land. We could not reach the pumps. “ The copra cargo and fuel tanks must have caught fire. We could not stop the engines, and the ship churned ahead for three hours. We sealed the engine room, bored holes in the decks, and all hands got busy with buckets of water, Wo didn’t stop for nineteen hours, and there was three feet of water in the hold when we left.

“Two lifeboats were provisioned, and we went over at 2,30 the next morning. It was dark and choppy. The whole ship was beginning to burn and we hoped someone might see it, though those are lonely sens, in the darkness the steamer Niagara saw the (lames thirty-live miles away. Wo fired distress rockets, and the Niagara changed her course to the spot. We had been in the lifeboats three and a-half hours when the Niagara’s lifeboats rescued us. The Niagara- looked mighty good to us as her lifeboats came up. Captain T. U. Hill, master of tlm Niagara, treated ns with every consideration, and I am now wearing a hat he loaned me.” ■Captain Davison suffered injury to his left foot as he was boarding the Niagara, and he game into San Francisco on crutches. The officers and crew of the Doris Crane lost all their belongings, and Captain Davison was able to save nothing except the ship’s mail and papers and one or two nautical instruments.