THE SIXTH SENSE OF THE SAILOR.

Hokitika Guardian, 30 August 1923, Page 4

THE SIXTH SENSE OF THE SAILOR.

(Hv an old Sailing Ship Hand in Daily .Mail). Twenty-three days at sea. in open boats! Twenty-three days lost to the world—and in these days of wireless: And then to make port safely after all.'

It is a cliche to call the story of the • Trevossa an epic. It is simply the ro- ■ online of the sea roiled hack fifty tears. It belongs, not l.r the well-laid sea lanes 1 oi the charted and commercialised ocean, Inn to the shipless wastes w herein ottr old merchant adventurers swung their yards to find a breeze unaided lit any chart or by ally sailing directions. It is, in short, the supreme anachronism of the news of ten year... It is the soul of the wind-jammer day- resurrected in steam. j To ni”. an old sailing -.tup ii-ind. ore. I fact stands otii like flare in a blink gale. They I’uimd their way-—crept along on j a Mark Ilf dead-reckoning, yard by yard J l o Rodriguez and safety, j 'I Inn may convoy nothing lo the landsman, who as often as mu thinks that a n,\: hing is possible ill the way of navigation so long as ona has a compass and a sextant. But a compass is the most unreliable instrument in ilie World* and a sextant is useless if there is tin .mil fn slmoi. lucre is. I think, some sixtli -eiiso that develops in the men of the sea v. herein they unerringly find their direction unaided to their landfall. Tliev did il by rule of thumb in all the centuries before the compass and Hie eliront.meter and the sextant wore in--1 -'Ulrtl. I really think that, although G:<\v ns” those instruments now, they still almost instinctively Work the thing b,\ rule of thumb. ih.j-o men on tin- Trevessti, once I he-, tod; to their boats, were older than Drake as old as the old Vikings who set out in their crazy eralt to find England hv the smell of the Goodwin Samis! I know that palicular part of foe ocean in which those boats to-sed and sagged am| nearly foundered. Once I spent seventeen days there, swung between the stars and the sea-lied, the wild • we wondered w here wo should let i'll Up. We never expected to see port.

lucre, or thereabouts, tin* low-lying swell could tell you the secret of the Warn tali—that passenger liner which disappeared into sheer nothingness in lb');. 1 . Xot a spar of hers did the dark -ea- jettison.

Those men of the Trevessa will he tolling their store soon. I suppose thev will I e in England within a month. But the sea does not let you toll everything. I can see those heats now—the biscuit barrels running low, the wafer beakers getting emptier and emptier, the sullen seas swinging down upon tlie water-logged boat.

Then- olt. do imagine it! —something just over the tip of a. wave, something "hicli cannot he actually identified as bind tor hours, perhaps for days. Thov glimpse it from the top of a forty-foot wave. For certainty, they must wait lor calm water, or until they are near enough to see it from tho trough of the sea. But—at last—rtodrigiu*:. A\ hat a story of the sea. those men will utterly and absolutely fail to MID