THE CAUSES OF THE GOTHENBURG WRECK.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 263, 15 April 1875, Page 3

THE CAUSES OF THE GOTHENBURG WRECK.

(B, 'ishatie Courier.') The mournful circumstance that not one of the executive officers of the ill-fated Gothenburg has escaped, renders the consideration of the accident to which her loss has been due a matter of mere speculation. That her captain was competent and watchful of her safety is sufficiently established, we conceive, by the terms of the address presented to him by the passengers who who made the upward voyage under his care. It is impossible to conceive that on such a night as that which witnessed the destruction of the steamer—a night of fierce gales, thunder, and lightning—the constant watchfulness so strongly testified to can have been remitted for a moment. The vessel was, according to the accounts of the narrators, speeding along at the time of the catastrophe under a full head of steam and a wide spread of sail. This free and dashing course speaks, in a case where recklessness is put out of the question by the previous (knowledge of the captain’s carefulness, of complete confidence in the security of the course being run. We are forced to the conclusion that from some unusual cause the security felt by careful officers was made delusive, and a little consideration and study point with some distinctness to a probable explanation, which fulfils all the required conditions. The wreck occurred about 6 o’clock in the evening, and the spot where it took place is the innermost patch of the reefs which form the Great Barrier line on the south side of the opening through that line known as Flinders Passage. Some twenty miles back, in the direction from which the Gothenburg had come, a prominent headland, known as Cape Bowling Green, projects into the ocean and forms a landmark which, with threatening weather and the night approaching, it is almost certain that a competent shipmaster would have made it his business to sight, in order to be able to take a departure which would carry him with confidence through the night. Yet within two hours of the time when, in all human probability, poor Captain Pearce had shaped his course after sighting this familiar milestone on the ocean road, his vessel is dashing at her fullest speed headlong on to an obstacle somewhere over three miles to the eastward of the proper fairway. In a run of twenty miles, therefore, in broad daylight, but out of sight of land, we find a vessel, commanded by competent and cautious officers, driven, by some cause plainly unsuspected, three miles out of her intended position. The question, therefore, lies in a nutshell. What influence can have been acting on the vessel as she traversed that stretch of water from Cape Bowling Green southwards for twenty miles. It appears to us that only one explanation is possible, and that the one which has every appearance of probability. To the west of the ship lay the land, indented by the numerous mouths of the Burdekin and Wickham rivers, then, like most of the other rivers along that coast, in high flood. Every schoolboy will remember, as one of the items of his learning in physical geography, that the current resulting from the freshes on the Amazon river at certain seasons makes itself felt seventy-eight leagues at sea. The Burdekin and the Wickham are but infantine rivulets, as compared with the mighty stream which drains half the surface of South America, but it can readily be conceived that at a distance, not of seventy leagues, but of little more than one-tenth that number of miles, a current capable of considerably deflecting the course of a vessel struck by it broadside on must have been created. This, we take it, has been the unforeseen and unreckoned force which deceived the navigators of the Gothenburg. On one side these rivers poured their swelled currents into the ocean; on the other, as they ran

that'fatal track of twenty miles of sea, gaped in the Barrier Reef a channel to which the current was naturally directed. In fact there appears some face of probability on the supposition that the absence at this point of the wall of coral which elsewhere runs parallel with the coast is due to the periodical freshening of the waters, resulting from the lavish tribute of the flooded rivers discharging opposite it. We have here, then, it may be, not the actual cause, but at any rate a probable one, sufficient to explain at the same time the position of the vessel and the evident confidence of her officers. An intermittent current, of a nature to escape previous notice on a route so little travelled till very recently, is pre eisely the sort of thing which answers and fits the difficulties which the case presents, and we adopt it the more readily that its acceptation enables the memory of the commander and his colleagues to be recalled, in time to come, without a thought of inefficiency or of recklessness of the lives entrusted to their charge being associated with their names.