SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 22 May 1901, Page 3

SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE.

The cargo steamers trading to the colony are being utilised by the Imperial Government to load warlike stores at the Capo for the army of occupation at the Transvaal. The Tokomaru, on her recent voyage to this colony, landed many hundred tons of shells and small arms, ammunition.

A few casualties (says an exchange) marked the homeward passage of the New Zealand Shipping Company's steamer Papanui. When near Cape Horn one of the crew fell down a hatch and broke qne of his thighs and left wrist, and while at Monte Video three of the coalers got buried in the coal down in the coal bunkers. Two of them were rescued after some labor, but it took six hours to dig out the third man, who was found to be dead.

Captain Bolt, of Newcastle, England, has invented a new form of deck-house or life-saving cabin, which, in case of sudden founderings from collisions or wreckage, would with a turn of a wheel, float off the doomed vessel in its entirety, and ride the waters like any other ship. Captain Bolt's new invention has received the approval of Trinity House. In the cabin are berths and seats and storage places where water and provisions are always kept. The only thing that remains to be done when the ship strikes a rock is to collect all the passengers and crew within the deck-house.

An exchange has a fine story to tell of what it describes as a •'toffee-ship," now discharging in London. It appears that the steamer Charing Cross shipped a cargo of sugar in bags at Buenos Ayres. Whether it was that the stuff was shipped too moist, or it '"ran" and got baked in the tropics, or otherwise behaved itself irregularly, does not appear, but the story is that when the hatches weie taken off the whole cargo was found to bo melted or frozen into a homogenous mass, without, apparently, any regard to the bags. The dock people have been working at it for eight weeks with crowbars and pick-axes at the cost of thousands sterling.