The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1912. AN OCEAN TRAGEDY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 246, 17 April 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1912. AN OCEAN TRAGEDY.

it seems all too certain now that the earlier messages concerning the disaster to the mammo'th liner, the Titanic, were more correct than the optimistic cablegrams that followed them. Apparently one more terrible disaster has been added to the history of the ceaseless and unrelenting toll which the angry deep is eternally - demanding from humanity. At present the details of this awful calamity are meagre in the extreme, but it. is practically certain that a disaster, almost unparalleled in the history of modern Shipping, has occurred, and that the giant liner, proudly making her maiden voyage with a "pomp and circumstance" befitting her elaborate splendor, has gone to the bottom, carrying with her a large proportion of her numerous complement. The wreck has been a singularly tragic, one. In the calm darkness of a quiet Sabbath evening, from what can be gathered, the mighty steamer crashed into a submerged iceberg with such force that all the elalborate arrangements for her safety from collision were set at naught. Then instantly out across the restless ocean came her appeal for help. The blind fingers of her wirelesis apparatus reached out east and west across the void, searching for some sister ship or : some neighboring station, and almost before the immensity of the disaster could be realised, the Virginian and the Baltic and the Olympic were racing to her assistance. But even modem science has failed to completely annihilate space, far as it has moved in this direction, and the succoring ships apparently arrived too late to do more than rescue those who had taken to the boats. There is still a hope that others of the passengers and crew of the iM-fated vessel have been rescued, but in any event the loss of life must have been appalling. The dreadful suddenness of the catastrophe must have accentuated its horror. "The last messages," reads a pathetic cablegram, "were blurred and ended abruptly," and the tragedy that underlies this suggestive statement is better imagined than described. The tragedy has no moral. It illustrates once more the immense futility of scientific achieve* ment at grips with Nature, for when the Titanic was launched it was proudly proclaimed for her that she was unsink-

able and immune from the conquering perils of the sea. Out of the depths her last messages wan.lered pathetically to the not far distant land by means of the mysterious wireless, and it is more than probable that the installation of this eighth wonder of the world was the means of reducing the d.ath list from its already far too desperate proportions. In the meantime, far as we are from the .seme of the calamity, the deepest sympathy will be expressed for those who have been so suddenly and tragically robbed of their dear ones, and we can still hope that later news will reduce the dimensions of one of the most appalling disaster* of modern days.