PERILOUS VOYAGE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 408, 2 October 1875, Page 3

PERILOUS VOYAGE.

An account given by Iron of certain incidents in a late voyage of the Hamburg steamer Cimbria forms a significant commentary on an observation made by Mr W. R. Greg in his recent lecture on “ Life at High Treasure.” The dangers to which the American liners are exposed from the ice borne by the Arctic current along the Newfoundland coast are at certain seasons of the year very formidable, and it ought to be generally known that they are also quite gratuitous, and that ships, passengers, and crew—the two latter, as Iron dryly remarks, “not underwritten”—are risked to save a few days in the voyage. What that risk amounts to is strikingly shown in the case of the steamer above referred to. She left Hamburg on the 10th of March for New York with 483 passengers and the German mails. On the afternoon of the 19th an irregular and brilliant mass bore in sight to the southward, and at the cry of the lookout, “Mountains of ice ahead!” all the passengers hurried on deck. A magnificent iceberg rapidly approached, until it displayed in stupendous proportions its sparkling peaks and slopes covered with snow at three miles distance. The skipper of course gave it a wide berth, and when the sun had disappeared, fortunately to give place to the moon in a clear sky, the scene had changed. For miles on every side the

ship was surrounded by a field of ice, only broken at intervals by the swelling of the waves. The captain turned the steamer’s bead to the south ; but, after some time, despairing of opening a way in that direction, issued orders to penetrate westward, and the Cimbria until two o’clock in the morning, “ went gallantly on, her iron prow crashing along the ice, which varied in thickness from 2ft to 3ft. Blue water at length appeared, and the danger was passed, bnt the ship had lirst traversed sixty miles southward and then seventy miles in a westward direction, before getting rid of the lloe,” but had the ship’s course been shrouded by oue of the fogs common in these latitudes, the result might have been very different. It would be interesting to know how much of the time supposed to be saved by steaming into the ice ffoes was lost in steaming southward to get out of it. To take a course which risks life without necessarily saving time appears to be a double offence against prudence.