A HERO AND MARTYR.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2104, 20 November 1880, Page 3

A HERO AND MARTYR.

[“Boston Pilot.”] Peter Woodland was the assistant-engineer of the Hudson River Tunnel, a part of which caved in on the morning of July 21st. Twenty-eight men were at work under his directions when the fatal leak was discovered. Ho at once gave orders to stop it, if possible. It needed but to see that this could not be done. He immediately stationed himself at the door leading to the air lock, which was the only means of egress. Instead ot being tho first to escape, as ho might easily have done, he stood at his post helping the others out until eight of them had passed through. The ninth got caught in tho doorway, and the heavy gate, impelled by an avalanche of wood and water, swung to, wedging him firmly between it and the doorposts. Peter Woodland, realising the situation, directed the eight men who had reached a position of comparative safety, to take off their clothes and stop up the part of the doorway which was not closed by the unfortunate man’s body.

This gave temporary respite to the survivors, but still the water and earth kept falling in, and it was evident that only a few minutes of life remained to all unless the compressed atmosphere in the air-lock were allowed to escape through the farther door. To open that door would bo to offer a fair chance of escape to the eight, at the cost of sure and instant death to the twenty. The electric light in the working shaft had been extinguished, and the men in the air-lock could see but dimly the forms of their unfortunate friends who were almost submerged in the rapidly rising flood. Woodland was next to the door of the air-lock. This hero was a young man only thirty-five years old. He had a happy home, a wife and two children, everything that makes life dear. Such a man at such a moment might well bo pardoned if the thought of home and all that made life precious had made him forgetful of the strange men who were perishing by his side. But it was not so with Mr Woodland, the engineer of the Hudson River Tunnel, and martyr to a contractor’s ignorance or meanness. The men in the air-lock saw his face pressed against the bull’s-eye light. It was pale but calm. He made a signal to the man, said—- “ Break open the outside bull’s-eye.” The men, who knew that to obey meant instant death to the giver of the order, hesitated a moment; there was surely something of the hero, too, in those men who could recognise and falter before the sacrifice. But Woodland’s voice was heard again—“ Knock out the bull’s-eye, I say ; knock it out.” There was no time for parley. Tho order was obeyed. The compressed air set free, the farther door moved before their united strength, and the eight men rushed up tho ladders as the flood came pouring at their heels. Woodland and his comrades had been suffocated at the first stroke of the breaking glass. The sacrifice made by this simple hero of tho tunnel was not great, if we measure the value of life by its duration. He had but a few moments to live at best; but who that realises the awfulness of impending death can doubt that those moments were dearer to him than years of quiet life to us ; that to abridge them by the hundredth fraction of a minute I was as heroic a sacrifice as any that the I human mind can conceive of ? Honor to I Peter Woodland, the Dane, for that he did (which tho Highest Authority has pronounced the perfection of human love.