SAVING LIFE AT SEA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1523, 7 November 1873, Page 5

SAVING LIFE AT SEA.

With reference to the wreck of the Atlantic, Mark Twain has written the following letter: —

When the Mississippi was burned at sea some time ago, and nearly all her boats were smashed in the effort to cast them loose, or were swamped the instant they struck the water, 1 wrote a letter suggesting that ships be provided with life rafts, instead of these almost useless borts. I did not expect that the Government would jump at the suggestion, and I was not disappointed. The Government had business on hand at the;time which would benefit not only our nation, but the whole world—l mean the project of paying Congressmen over again for work which they had already been paid to do; that is to say, the labor of receiving Credit Mobilier donatiens and forgetting the circumstance. But that shining public benefit being accomplished, why cannot the Government listen to me now ? The Atlantic had eight boats, of course —all steamers have. Not one of the boats saved a human life. The great cumbersome things were shivered to atoms by the sea that swept over the stranded vessel. And suppose they had not been shivered, would the case have been better? Would not the frantic people have plunged pell-mell into each boat as it was launched ? They always do. But a life-raft is a different thing. All the people you can put on it cannot swamp it. Nobody understands davitalls but, a sailor; and he don't when he gets frightened ; but any goose can heave a life-raft overboard, and then some wise man can throw him after it. The sort of life raft I have in my mind is an American invention, consisting of three inflated horizontal india-rubber tubes, with a platform on top. These rafts are of all sizes, from a little affair of the size of your back door to a raft 22ft. long and 6ft. or Bft. wide. As you remember, no doubt, two men crossed the Atlantic from New York to London, some jears ago, no one of these rafts of the latter size. The raft would carry 120 men. Nine such rafts would have saved the Atlantic's 1,000 souls, and these rafts, fully inflated ready for use, would not have occupied as much room on her deck as four of her lubberly boats; hardly more than the room of three of her boats, indeed. Her boats were probably 30ft. long, 7ft. deep, and 7ft. or Bft. wide at the gunnels. You could furnish a ship with medium and full sized rafts—an equal number of each —and pile them up in the space now occupied by four boats, and then you could expect to save all her people, not merely a dozen or two. They would sail away through a storm, sitting high and dry from two to four feet above the tops of the waves. In addition to the rafts, the ship could carry a boat or two for promiscuous general service, and for the drowning of old fogies who like oldestablished ways. You could attach a raft to a ship with a ten fathom line and heave it overboard on the lee side in the roughest sea and it can't fall any way but right side up, and there it will lie and ride the waves like a duck, till it receives its freight of food and passengers—and then you can cut the line and let her go. But if you launch a boat, it usually falls upside down ; and if it don't, the people crowd in and swamp it. Boats have sometimes gone away safely with people and taken them to land, but such accidents are rare. I am not giving you a mere landsman's views upon this raft business; they are the views of several old sea captains and mates whom I have talked with, and their voice gives thern weight and value. Our Government has so many important things to attend to, that we cannot reasonably expect the English Government to bother with them, because'this admirable contrivance is a Yankee invention, and our mother is not given to adopting our inventions until she has had time to hunt around among her documents, and discover that the crude idea originated with herself in some bygone time, then she adopts it and builds a monument to the crude originator. England has our liferaft on exhibition in a museum over there (the raft that made the wonderful voyage), and heaps of people have gone in every day for several years, and paid for the privilege of looking at it. Perhaps many a bereaved poor soul whose idols lie stark and dead under the waves that wash the beach of-Nova Scotia may wish, as I do, that it had been on exhibition on board the Atlantic.