DRAMA ON SHIP

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 381, 16 November 1932, Page 6

DRAMA ON SHIP

TWO MEN'S FATAL DISPUTE WHILE VESSEL SINKS. PROBLEM OF LAST TO LEAVE. While a ninety-five-mile-an-hour wind was lashing the London cargo steamer Watford, which lay with her back broken on the rocks of Nova Scotia recently, two men stood on th'e deck and argued with each other. The story of this last argument was told when the thirty survivors of the vessel reached Liverpool in the liner Adriatic. "When we were driven on to the rocks we tried to lower a boat," said one of them "Failipg in this, the second officer, Mr. H. Mant, volunteered to swim ashore with' a rope. He got thefe after a terrible struggle, but the rope was swept loose from the ship. "V/e fired rocket lines to Cape Breton fish'ermen and rigged up a bos'n's chair from ship to shore. One by one the crew were hauled across until only two men remained in the ship — the mate and the bos'n. On the sands the rest of the crew were waiting to help them, but there was a delay — the two men seemed to be malcing no effort to get ashore. The mate and the bos'n had begun to argue. "While the hurricane — the worst on the coast for sixty years — was raging, the two figures could be seen-ges-ticulating. Neither would agree to go first and leave the other. Finally they decided to go otgether. The bos'n climbed into the swinging chair on the line, and the mate tried to get in beside him, but he suddenlyf lost his hold, fell into the sea, and was drowned." ' The mate was Mr. William Knight, of Aberdeen, and the bos'n is Mr. Dqnald Murray, of Stornoway, in the Hebrides.