DEAD MEN ADRIFT

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 263, 27 January 1928, Page 12

DEAD MEN ADRIFT

SEVEN MONTHS IN THE PACIFIC ONLY DRIED BONES LEFT Two partly-mummified bodies and a heap of bleached human bones, which had been found tumbled together in a disabled and drifting Japanese fishing smack, have been brought into Seattle by the cargo steamer Margaret Dollar. What tragic tale of the sea was outlined by these silent witnesses is now being revealed. Cipher-like inscriptions were found scratched on a board in the cabin of the dead-manned smack; and these have now been translated by the Japanese Vice-Consul at Seattle. To-day’s reading of the wooden scribe-marks is like a new legend of the "Ancient Mariner.” It shows that even in these days, when great merchant fleets cover all the seas, a little 85ft. vessel can drift for seven months about the Pacific before being sighted. Dead Men’s Great Voyage The Margaret Dollar came across the death-manned derelict in the North Pacific, off the State of Washington, about 4,000 miles from the coast of Japan. Half of the tale of the smack’s last sinister voyage can now be told. Her name is Rio Yei IVlaru, which means "good and prosperous ship.” At the end of last winter she -left her home port in Japan, and went afishing. Very soon she became the sport of the typhoon; and then, through spring and summer and the autumn equinox, she was tossed to and fro by changing winds on shifting currents till she had come to the home waters of another hemisphere. Faithless Petrol Power What the Margaret Dollar found was a thing of shredded sails, twisted deckgear and blistered and faded paint. Its once white wings had at first had the assistance of a petrol engine. But the hardly decipherable writing on the cabin recounted how the engine had “stalled.” All the efforts of the dozen men of the crew to restart it were in vain. Then the long agony of the doomed rqariners began. From the fragmentary "log” which they left in the cabin it appears that their last husbanded scrap of food gave out over three months ago. Then the last water dried. Then, about the beginning of August, the first man of the 12 lay down and died. Last Scene of All It is recorded that the reman :, - 11 abandoned all hope; and the rerre i a set of laconic indications of the mi - ner of the end. • Three men, presumably driven insane by their sufferings, jumped o nboard. To what desperate extremity the who then still clung to life were forced to resort cannot be known; but it is not beyond all conjecture. There remain the heaped bones of seven men who must, one after another, have died of privation, or killed themselves, or been killed for food for their demented companions. The bodies of the two who remained last alive were found in the bunks of a tiny cabin abaft the traitorous engine. Facing each other at the last, they -'-ad committed hara-kiri.