TRAGEDY OF THE SEA

Evening Star, Issue 21747, 15 June 1934, Page 9

TRAGEDY OF THE SEA

FREIGHTER DESTROYED BY FIRE ONE LIFEBOAT STILL MISSING Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright. NEW YORK, June 13. A tale of swift tragedy in the Caribbean Sea, the destruction by fire of tho Norwegian freighter Knut Hamsun, with seventeen or eighteen persons missing, was told to-day in a terse wireless message from the United fruit liner Zac-apa. The captain and sixteen members of the crew, alter drifting in a lifeboat for nearly three days, were rescued by the Zac-apa. A search for tho second lifeboat containing the chief officer and sixteen others was abandoned at midday by the Zacapa, which continued to Havana. Advices from the freighter’s agent in Panama said that tho missing About must contain tho mate and seventeen members of the crew, as the ship's list showed thirty-five persons. In abandoning the search the Zacapa sent a message expressing the belief that the lifeboat would drift to the Cays off tho Nicaraguan coast. The tiny islands are known as the Mosquito and Morrison Cays. The freighter, with a cargo of nitrate from Chile for Newport News, caught fire and was burned to the water’s edge, sinking on Sunday night when about 150 miles off the Nicaraguan coast near Quitasuena Bank. Tho lire spread so rapidly that the crew were forced to the lifeboats without sending out an S.O.S.