SEAS SEAMEN DAREN'T SAIL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 190, 1 August 1908, Page 4

SEAS SEAMEN DAREN'T SAIL.

'THE WORST \\| TJ j KS 1X THB WHOLE IWOULD. • Ask the average man what is the ugliest bit of sea die knows, and ten to olio ho will tell/you the English channel. A yachtsman who knows his Mediterranean will; mention that horrible ''race" between Cadiz and Tangier*. The globe-trotter who has sailed round the world is willing to bet upon the tract of wild waters to the south of iron-bound Capo Horn, but the sailor will tell you, and tell you true, tliit the wickedest, cruellest bit of water On our planet is encountered in roundiii" the Cape of Hood Hope from west r.o oast.

All these and many others that might be mentioned are tracts of sea wlihh are full of danger. Yet in a well-found vesesl they arc perfectly navigable, and vessels do cross them in safctv every day of the vear.

There are, however, portions of the world's oceans which every skipper avoids like the plague, and into which nothing but the sternest necessity will cause him to venture his ship. One such lies beyond Cape Gunrdafiii, that sharp point which runs out from the East African coast, south of the Gulf of Aden.

Eighty miles south of Guardafui is another great headland known as Ras llafun. The coast between these two headlands is in the hands of utterlv savage tribes, and the result is th it neither of the points is li'dited. I'he coast is a mass of rocks, yet at a very little distance the water is so deep that tin) lead line gives no warning of the vessel's approach to land. \ To make matters worse, the monsoon here rages with appalling violence, and once caught in such a storm, with the full drive of the whole Indian Ocean behind it, a vessel is either smashed to pieces on the rocks or driven ashore, and hor crew delivered into the hands . f looting, merciless savages. It is a curious fact that, while the lied Sea is one of the chief of the world's shipping highways, yet there is a stretch on its east coast, from Jeddah to Hodeidah, into which no skipper would venture his vessel.

The waters swarm with pirates, pirates who emerge from shallow winding harbours where no warship'can reach then:. Every year they take toll of small coasters, and cannot he suppressed. There are other seas which the pres- j once of black Hag marauders still render dangerous to any but fast and wellfound ships. These are chiefly along tile Chinese coasts. Quite recently there havo been complaints from Hong. Kong of the sea raiders who haunt the mouth, of the West liivc.r. A year or two ago the steamer St. Olaf was wrecked in Seven Islands Bay on the Labrador coast, and of all her crew and passengers, but one, u girl, was saved alive. Several others struggled ashore, only lo lose their lives wandering in the deep snow which covered tin: land.

Ir is not only fogs and storms, rocks and licree currents which make this stretch of sea so perilous. The benches are covered with a black . sand, whijh is almost pure, magnetic iron ore. These deposits affect the compasses of ships so strongly as to cause them to work wrongly, and many a vessel has thus been east away.

Cape liace, the south-eastern extremity of Newfoundland, is another point shunned by sailors. During the past forty years no fewer than ninety-four ocean-going ships have been wrecked on the iron-bound dill's of Cape Race, involving a loss of over two thousand lives and three million pounds. Cape Kaee's chief dangers are drifting ice and currents of uncertain set but enormous power. Tlio fogs which fall there are sudden and thick as wool. Once, iif 180 H, three big cargo ships were piled up on the shore north of Cape liace in one day and night. Kockall, that strange islet almost in mid-Atlantic, where, in 1004, the emigrant ship Xorge was wrecked .with fearful loss oE life, is the centre of another piece of sea which all mariners religiously avoid. North from Rockall, .Helen's reef runs unseen under water for no less than four miles, and, as the island itself is entirely unlighted, it Is easy to see why all ships give this deathtrap a very wide berth.

So many weavers of fiction h.ave> written wildly imaginative accounts of the Sargasso Sea that many have come to look upon the sea itself as a myth. Hut is no myth. Take the Atlantic

as a basin, the Sargasso Sea is its smooth, almost motionless, centre, anil here are thousands of square miles of stagnant water, a marine rubbish heap, where I lie surface is covered with wed, in which are tangled amazing quantities of drift wood.

I'Yw have ever seen tho Sargasso Sea, for no seaman wilfully ventures near it. Xo sailing ship can drive through tile masses of weed, and in all probability no steamer could work through if, either, fur the weeds would soon hopelessly (angle the propeller.