PICKED UP AT SEA.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 449, 26 February 1890, Page 4

PICKED UP AT SEA.

A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS ADRIFT. News by the China steamer at Sydney states that last month the barque Joseph S. Spinney, from San Francisco, brought into Kobe (Japan) a shipwrecked crew of six South Sea Islanders, whom she had picked up in an open canoe. While making their way from one island to another they had been blown ‘2OO miles out to sea, and had, when rescued, been adrift 18 days without food or water. The chief, or king, died from exhaustion after being rescued, and the Spinney cock-billed her lower yards in consequence. The chief and one or two of the others knew a little English, and it has therefore been possible to glean some part of their story. On the 23rd of November the men, seven in number, set out with their old king to pay a visit to a neighbouring chief upon another island, one of the Pelevv Group, situated between the Philippines on the east and the Caroline Islands on the west. They were eight persons all told, and the craft was a dugout 30 feet length by 15 inches beam. Before they could reach their port a gale had sprung up, and they were rapidly blown out to sea, at the mercy of the winds and wave*, and without food and without water. In this awful plight they remained for 18 days., or until December 11th, when the old king, faint with hunger and mad with thirst, decided that his son, a boy aged 16 years, mu6t be killed in order that his father and the others might live. Preparations were made and all but complete when the white sails of the Joseph S. Spinney were descried on the horizon. The boy was saved. Slowly the big vessel came up, and the poor wretches were taken on board. The only two words the old king could articulate as he lay gasping in his canoe were “ Rope, water.” The crew presented a dreadful sight.. Their stomachs had shrunk in, and their chief was so wasted that the chief mate carried him up the ship’s gangway under his arm. The only things in the boat were a knife or two, a pair of scissors, a tattered straw sail, and two paddles. The canoe was hoisted in, its very size eloquently attesting what the sufferings of the men must have been, unable to move or stretch their limbs for want of space. It of course had been fitted with outrigger spars like a catamaran. When picked up, the men, of whom another besides the king has died, were 210 miles from the nearest land.