LINER ON REEF

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 881, 27 January 1930, Page 9

LINER ON REEF

PASSENGERS LANDED AT PENAL ISLAND LODGING DIFFICULTIES United P.A.—By Telegraph—Copyright BUENOS AYRES, Saturday. A German steamer, the Monte Cervantes, struck a reef in Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego, on Wednesday. Her passengers and crew, numbering 1,500 in all, were safely transferred to the shore on Ushuaia Island. Captain Dreyer, however, returned to the ship and was drowned next day when a storm arose. The steamer was broken in halves and slipped into deep water under the buffeting of thundering seas. The passengers numbered 1,100 and included 50 South American millionaires. Some concern is felt about their plight, as the island of Ushuaia is a penal settlement separated from the mainland by Beagle Channel. It is a bleak, forbidding spot. The only buildings on the island beside the prison quarters are a disused mission station and a few stores and residences. These are altogether inadequate to accommodate such a large influx of lodgers. The steamer Monte Sarmiento, a sister-ship to the sunken craft, has been ordered south from Montevideo to pick up the stranded people. The Monte Cervantes was a steelscrew steamer of 13,913 tons gross register. She belonged to the Ham-burg-South American Steamship Company and was built in 1927 by Blohm and Voss at Hamburg, her port of registry. Beagle Channel, a strait 180 miles long, is on the south of the main island of Tierra del Fuego (“the land of fire”), the most southerly region of South America. It is separated from South Patagonia by the Strait of Magellan. The town of Ushuaia is principally known as a convict station. The population numbers 1,600, including about 600 prisoners condemned to penal servitude.