OCEAN MYSTERIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 863, 6 January 1930, Page 16

OCEAN MYSTERIES

THE “GRAVEYARD” ROOM TITANIC TO KOBENHAVN Around the walls of a room known as the ‘'Graveyard” in the Royal Exchange, the home of the famous shipping corporation of Lloyd’s, London, are many hundreds of green-backed volumes telling strange tales of adventures at sea. f The records range back for more than a century, yet. even in these scientific days of transatlantic radio telephones from ship to shore, direction finders and echo-sounding devices against the perils of fog and darkness, Lloyd’s are continually adding to these secret archives tales as true and strange as any ever written in the far-off days before the first paddle steamer churned the waters on the long track “from Liverpool to New York, writes Harold T. Wilkins in “Popular Mechanics” Magazine. Many of these skeletons in Davy Jones’s cupboard are never revealed to newspaper readers. Some of them are in the shape of genuine bottle messages cast ashore years after a startling sea disaster. A few months ago, a man was walking at evening along the sands of a quiet bay, the Mumbles of Swansea, South Wales, when he picked up a bottle containing a note, a gold scarf-pin with a stone missing, and a photograph of two men. Said the writer: “This is the last moment the great ship Titanic sank. lam left here with my brother-in-law, John Williams, wife and little child Jean, having left the doomed ship on the last boat. The band is still playing, the officers are running here and there, although their tasks are hopeless: men are going mad, while . . . (unreadable).” This tragic last message so strangely cast up from Davy Jones’s graveyard in 1929, 17 years afterward, throws light on the last moments of the liner Titanic, which collided with an iceberg in mid-Atlantic on her maiden trip, on April 15. 1912, when she sank with 1,635 passengers out of a total of 3,510 on board. On December 14, 1928, a steel threemasted barque, the Danish sailing ship Kobenhavn. sailed from Montevideo, Uruguay, for Melbourne, Australia, with 50 naval cadets. Cables nd radio reported ice floating in the southern ocean along the track she would take. She was a 3.901-ton ship, said to be the world’s largest sailer, and carries no able seamen, but was to be handled by the cadets. Her radio had only a short range, and to reach shore stations messages would have to be relayed by passing ships. Auxiliary motor engines could have driven her one screw, in case of need. Seven days after she left Montevideo she sent a message regarding her progress, then nothing more was heard. Next, on June 18,* 1929, the cables hummed with a message, when Captain H. Kristensen, of the motor-ship Mexico, came into Table Bay, Capetown, with a riddle to solve: “I find that on January 21 last the Kobenhavn passed Tristan da Cunha with her sail reduced to a single jib,

and fore, lower and topsail. Other sails carefully stowed and furled. She came drifting on the current, a quarter of a mile off Tristan reef. Nobody was seen aboard, and. her helm was unmanned. When she was near striking the reef, she turned, and the current carried her. into the mist, in which she vanished. It is as puzzling as the Marie Celeste mystery. Either the Kobenhavn had been abandoned or. her whole. crew was down with disease or poisoning. The Islanders are sure she was- undamaged, but slightly down by the stern. I reckon she is still afloat or has been washed up on the desert coast of south-west Africa or in the Antarctic.” The tale of the Eltham steamer is a strange one. The villagers of the lonely Cornish hamlet of Chapel Forth woke up after a night of roaring gales and tumultuous seas, on November 18, 1928, and walked down in the dawn to the edge of granite cliffs, where they looked down on a steamer, lying 200 yards from the- shore, with a broken back. Fishermen put out in boats to the submerged wreck and found she was the Eltham, a 687-ton steamer owned by a Liverpool firm, and bound for Rouen, France, with a cargo of coal from Swansea, which she had left the previous Thursday. There was no sign of her crew, and coastguards near by had seen no flares or rockets in the night. A few hours later a smashed lifeboat, bearing the name S.S. Eltham, was washed ashore in a cove six miles away. Many small and storm-hound ships lay at anchor in nearby haven, but none had sighted the Eltham when they fled from the hurricane. Ten days later the seas abated enough for a volunteer fisherman to hoard the wreck of the Eltham at low tide, with a lifeline tied to his waist. He found the steamer badly holed, but no logbooks or papers of any kind. Her anchors and chains were stowed aw r ay, but there was no sign of any cargo. Fittings had been washed away, but engines and boiler were still intact, and there was nothing to show why the crew had abandoned her, save for the hole in her hull, which might have been due to breakers on the shore. Was the Eltham deserted many miles away in midTAtlantic, and did she drive derelict to her doom with no crew aboard? If so, what became of her cargo?