THIRST AT SEA.

Motueka Star, Volume IV, Issue 146, 13 January 1903, Page 4

THIRST AT SEA.

A correspondent who has been reading telegraphed accounts of the terriblesufferings of the crew of the wrecked steamer Elingamite, tells a London paper that the following statement was once made in his hearing by Professor Richard Owen, the great anatomist:— "There is little occasion for anybody at sea to suffer much by thirst: If in a boat or raft men will only sit with their legs, up to the calves, immersed in water for a short time, thirst of mouth and throat will soon be allayed." The skin, the correspondent explairs, "filters the water by endosmose, rejecting the salt and so. supplies the necessary pure liquid." The ghastly account of blood drinking by the survivors of the Elingamite has revived the story of a ease which aroused great interest in this country in 1884. For 24 days the crew of a wrecked yacht, consisting of the master, the mate, and able bodied seaman and a boy were in an open boat on the high seas a thousand miles from the Cape of Good Hope. They had no supply of water and no supply of food except two lib tins of turnips. On the fourth day they caught a turtle, and by the twelfth day this was finished; On the twentieth day the boy was killed, and they subsisted on him for four days until they were picked up in a state of prostration. The master and the mate were indicted for murder at Exeter, whence the case was referred to the Judges of the Queen's Bench. After a long and sensational trial the two men were condemned to death. They were subsequently reprieved, and sentenced to six' months hard labour.