"PORT OF MISSING SHIPS"

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 62, 4 July 1914, Page 7

"PORT OF MISSING SHIPS"

Discussing the many vessels that have gone to the "Port of Missing Ships" in recent years, when homeward bound from Australia and New Zealand, a retired shipmaster attributes most of the disappearances to collisions with ice in the Southern Ocean. He states he saw in his time more ice islands than were agreeable. On one occasion he was embraced for eleven days in an 'archipelago of bergs some half a mile in length and higher than a vessel's masthead, and it was only by most careful navigating that he then got clear undamaged. On another occasion his vessel almost ran right on to a huge expanse of field ice, lying flat and low, therefore all the more dangerous; and he sailed for forty miles along its ledge before he was able to continue the passage eastward. Not many years ago, too, the old Shaw. Savill and Albion liner Wellington struck an iceberg, and it was only with great difficulty that she reached a South African port. The?? instances, he considers, must be regarded, and, failing better proof, the ice theory ought, perhaps, to hold ground eg well as many others less likelv.