Terrible Suffering at Sea.

Feilding Star, Volume XIX, Issue 70, 20 September 1897, Page 4

Terrible Suffering at Sea.

o ADRIFT IN AN OPEN BOAT. A tale of the sea, writes onr London correspondent, of a startling and horrible nature was told the other day by the survivors of the French schooner Vaillant. The Vaillant was lost on the bank ! of Newfoundland some little time back, - but the full and horrible details bad not np till a day or two ago been published. The schooner, it seems, struck on an icefloe which barely showed above the water, and had not been seen. She began to settle down immediately, and the boats were at once lowered under considerable difficulties Three of the smaller boats got adrift and one of the larger ones, and there were two launches capsized. A panic resulted and a number of the crew jumped overboard. Twenty two men embarked in the long boat and the remainder scrambled into the smaller boats, and within half an hour of striking the floe the Vaillant sank. Such had been tbe rush to get awty from the ship that tbe men fonnd themselves, when the schooner sank close beside them, without food or even oars to work the boats. One boat had in it seven fishermen, and for the first two days they wero kept busy day and night, baling out the water with their wooden pattens, the sea being very rough. The boat drifted about helplessly, and its occupants had so little control over it that they were unable to go to the rescue of a comrade clinging to the bottom of a capsized boat some ten yards away, and in trying to swim over to them, this seaman, whose name was Rabel, was drowned. Two days after the loss of the schooner one man died of exposure, and the following day another sailor named Carre died. The survivors all agreed to cut strips off his body for food, and when two days later a third sailor named Dutbeil succumbed, as they were dying of thirst they cut out bis heart and sucked tbe blood. Tbe same day their signals of distress were noticed from the three-masted schooner Victor Eugane, and they were taken on board and after careful attention laoded at St. Pierre Mequelon a week later. One of the four survivors of this boat had both his legs frozen and succumbed after their amputation, but the other three had only trifling injuries from frost-bite. Four more tailors of the Vaillant were picked up three days later by the schooner Amedce They had been eight days in the boat and had seen seventeen of their comrades die of exposure and exbaustioo from want of food and water. Tbe surviving four had lived upon a dog and some pieces of ice they had chipped off an iceberg. Two of the four were so severnly frost bitten tbat they had to have both legs amputated ; another had to have bis right leg and lift foot cut off, and tbe remaining two lost several toes. In all there are left only seven out of the Vaillant's crew of 72, and five of thtse are cruelly maimed.