FRIGHTFUL SUFFERINGS AT SEA.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 42, 18 July 1874, Page 3

FRIGHTFUL SUFFERINGS AT SEA.

A terrible story of sufferings at sea comes from the Bast Indies. It is well authenticated, or the hasty reader might suppose it to be a mere plagiarism of one of the most powerfully-told episodes in “ Foul Play.” The Arracan, coal laden, bound from Shields to Bombay, seems to have been abandoned somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the crew saving themselves in the boats. One of these boats was picked up in the Arabian Sea, on the 20th of last month, and in it were three men and two boys, who had been adrift for thirty-two days with only ten days’ supplies of food. It needs no demand on the imagination of the merest landsman to guess what awful suffering that one fact involves, but the fate of the poor castaways is brought all the more vividly before us in the further detail that eleven days previous to their being picked up the last bit of bread was eaten and the last drop of water drunk. The comfort-loving, stay-at-home Briton, who wants to realise some faint approach to the suffering thus indicated, has only to vary his easy existence by going for one day without food and water, to supplement this by exposure to a scorching sun by day and to chilling dews at night, and then to throw in an unknown sum of mental agony such as the landsman never had occasion to feel and must utterly fail to conceive, and when he has done this he has approximated to an estimate of just an eleventh part of the misery this boat’s crew experienced. The result may be imagined. Every device which poor nature, gnawed by insatiable cravings to satisfy its wants has in such circumstances adopted, was tried in turns. “ They chewed lead to moisten their throats, tried to eat their boots and jelly-fish, and in delirium sought to kill one another, inviting death. Blood from wounds in a fray was eagerly drunk, but when the frenzy passed the men would shake hands and kiss one another.” Death, however did not come to these poor creatures, maddened by suffering, and yet in their awful solitude clinging with a strange sense of helplessness to one another,.- So we gradually came to the next scene, which surpasses anything in Charles Reade’s powerful fiction. Lots were cast for a victim to be devoured, and the doomed one was a boy ; but, fortunately the last horror was averted by the resolution of the mate, and it appears no life was either lost or sacrificed. Such a chapter of the perils of the sea carries its own moral, and it is to be feared that, so long as men “do business on the great waters,” they will be exposed to suffering and danger from the two capricious elements with which they have to deal, such as the dweller on terra firma necessarily escapes. But a good many shipwrecks are due to preventible causes, and when the Plimsoll movement has had its full measure of success, there will certainly be fewer stories of abandoned ships and storm-tossed seamen driven to the last resort of cannibalism.—London “ Daily Telegraph.”