STARVATION IN A MINE.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2692, 12 October 1889, Page 6 (Supplement)

STARVATION IN A MINE.

The story of the finding of Hobson's body in tho Globe Colliery is one of the most intensely pitiable incidents that ever marked the history of mining. The sudden collapso of a drive, when thousands of tons of earth tall on the hapless miner and give him at once death and a sepulchre, is an event painful euough. But it pales into comparative iu.'ignificiince before that wholly awful fate which overtook the poor fellow Hudson. When the Glebe mine fell in and crushed the lives out of Hudson's mates, that hapless miner escaped this destiny only tofillintoauother, the horrors of which could not bo exceeded by the human imagination. A great mass of fallen coal blocked up the drive, and shut in Hudson as a prisoner. And then, for the remainder of his hapless life, all was darkness, desolation, solitude, and hunger. He may, perhaps, have caught the echoes of a few dying groans from thoso more fortunateones to whom death came quickly aud more mercifully. And doubtless at the first he esteemed himself blest in having escaped the crush of the debris. The position in which his corpse was found tells all his pitiful tales that men will ever know. The mouldering remains were found lying on the top of a ' fall' in an almost nude condition. There was no shirt or trousers on—in fact, nothing on the body save the waistband of the trousers. The poor fellow, previous to his last agony, had undressed himself and placed his clothes beneath him. He was found lying oa the broad of his back, with his shirt and trousers under his back. One garment was placed on his cheat, over which his arms were folded. The conclusion is that he must have been starved to death. Before removing the body an inspection was made of the surroundings, and there was found a beaten track, which had been formed by Hodson pacing up and down in kis despair. Such was the story which first came to us. Now we havQ u second chapter of the samo kind of horror. Three more bodies—those of Grant, Meddows, and Beaumont—have been found in a separate division of the mine, in almost the same conditon as that of Hnrlson. All of them, it is quite clear, met their deaths from the process of exhaustion from starvation. Hudson is said to hive tunnelled through the debris for no lessthan "25ydsbefore hegave up in despair. No eloquence of words can ever add to the pathos of those mute witnesses—the beaten track, the nude body, the stripped garments, and arms folded over the breast. Everything tells of a long-drawn-out, lingering end. For days Hodson must have lived in a kind of feverish hope of rescue. He knew that the miners would leave no effort untried to save life. If any external sound could pierce that living tomb, he must have strained his senses to catch one welcome echo from the outside world. After a day or two hunger and and thirst would assail him ; but these for a time would be half forgotten amidst the battle between his hope and despair of being rescued. For him there was no alternation of dayand night—no meatisof telling of the flight of time —nothing but a prologml, monotonous, agonised darkness. His sole solace—if such a world be not a mockery—was in the walk along that beaten track. And then would come a temporary oblivion in sleep—

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve ot care, Tin; death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. Halm of hurt minds, ureal Nature's second course' Chief neurisher in life's feast. But who can pain t the horrors of each awakening, when the slowly returning sense brought back with it all the overwhelming hopelessness of his state, with its comfortless present and its future of dark desolate death ! At length there came a time when reason tittered. This —God knows—may have been a time of mercy. It is said that people who die the death of starvation are often moved to do what poor Hodson did—strip themselves and wander for some time nude, before finally sinking under the last exhaustion. Before this stage, however, is reached the worst agony must be over. Nature has fought her great battle, and is giving out. The struggle is past, and the rest is but the flicker of life's spark in the famished frame. When poor Hodson made his last bed on the top of the ' fall,' he was clearly in the final stages of weakness, and death most likely came to him in the lethargy of sleep, for he lay with his arms folded upon his breatt. There was no struggle with the Kitig of Terrors. The day and hour of struggle had gone by. He lay down, and with him, as with Hamlet, the rest was silence.