FROM THE HUNGRY OCEAN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 273, 8 April 1911, Page 10

FROM THE HUNGRY OCEAN.

THE THREE KINGS AND THEIR TOLL. There has for some time past been hanging on the wall of the German Consulate in Auckland a pathetic relic of the .sea, adding, in mute eloquence, another to the melancholy possibilities over which the Three Kings stand sinister guard. In the month of November, H.>..i, the German ship Alsternixe, of 4240 tons, and ft crew of 43 souls, all told, sailed from the Peruvian port of Callao for Sydney, and thirteen months afterward*, in December, 1907, a wave-washed and battered lifebuoy, bearing the almost obliterated inscription, "Alsternixe, Hamburg," was picked up by the master of the Northern Company's steamer Chelmsford in Parengarenga Bay. Of the good ship and her ill-fated company nothing has ever been heard since the day she sailed from Callao, except the message conveyed in this little ring of cork. None but the sea birds can tell the place of her burial, and the waves alone droned her requiem, but there is good reason to believe that the bones of her and of those she carried are to be numbered among the other dead thiwgs sentinelled by the grim rocks; toll taken by the implacable sea for man's mistake in charting these islets several miles out of their true position. Although the probability is that this fine German ship struck one of the Kings and foundered with all hands, it is well known that the currents from the west strike round the northern end o( the island. As a matter of fact, Mr. C. Seegncr, German Consul, had returned to him last year a bottle found in the Kaipara Harbor, and which was thrown overboard oil' Kerguelen Island by the German Scientific South Pole Expedition in 1003. Roughly speaking, the distance between Kerguelen Island mid the New Zealand coast is about 4000 miles, but, although the general trend of the ocean currents is easterly from Kerguelen, the distance traversed by that battle in those seven years of buffeting would he very much more than 4000 miles. The currents appear to have a penchant for malting this coast of ours a rendezvous and a playground, for the number, of hoi tied messages that they throw up along the New Zealand coast is proportionately very large, which of itself would eonsttiute a strong argument for a warning light to mariners in the midst of such a dangerous drift as is the vicinity of the Three Kings.