“VENUS” INQUIRY

Hokitika Guardian, 16 December 1931, Page 6

“VENUS” INQUIRY

SAVAGE CAUSES SURPRISE, NEITHER FIRED UPON NOR CHASED. (United Press Association.—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) (Received this day at 12.25. p.m.) OSLO, December 15. When the inquiry into the loss of the “Venus” was opened at Manloe.y, Mr Savage, first officer and one of the few survivors, caused a surprise, declaring that she was neither chased nor fired upon. She left Rotterdam on November 5 and Lerwick on December 1, and thereafter cruised in the North Sea.

The captain alone determined the course, and nobody else participated in the navigation of the vessel. For all the. crew knew, they might have been off Iceland, not Norway, when thev were wrecked.

•She. carried 1800 t\vo-gallon cans of liquor, none of which was discharged prior to the wreck. The Lerwick excise officer’s seal thereon was not broken until half an hour before foundering, when the cans were emptied and used for floats and the construction of rafts. The captain ordered five men to take lifeboats and row to the lighthouse. They had not sufficient lifebelts, and were drowned when the boat capsized. Two rafts, supporting four men each, were made in desperate haste. The captain ordered the anchor to be dropped to check the vessel’s drift hut it did not hold the “Venus” which continued to drift shoreward broadside on. It struck a rook, heered, and flung the remainder of the crew into the water. Savage and a fireman, Davidson, seized some pieces oi wreckage, hut could not help the captain.. The engineer was afloat close, b.v iSavage, who declared that his memory was a blank alter being thrown into the water.