The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-06-28
HER CARGO TURNED TO TAFFY.

The Strange Transformation In the
 Here Is the story of a ship that start
 ed with a cargo of sugar and reached
 her port with cargo of taffy. The sea
 has no other story like it or none that
 has ever been recorded. The ship was
 the Charing Cross from Rosario, Ar
 genuine Republic, and the strange met
 a morphosis in her hold was not dis
 covered until she arrived at her dock
 in London.
 The cargo-thirty- one thousand bags | of sugar-was slowed away in four | different compartments of the ship and | the work of unloading commenced on the day following her arrival. The | ship and dock hands rapidly cleared
 the first, second and fourth holds with 1 out experiencing any difficulty, but
 when they came to unload No. they found that the sugar there had become
 one solid block of dark brown sub I tD thousand tons of sugar, had been
 converted into taffy. The mass was as hard as marble and it was found im-
 possible to unload it in the usual way. The hard substance was firmly at tached to the sides of the vessel and had encompassed everything else in it's grip, as nothing could be done but dig the stuff out.
 A body of forty men using picks and
 shovels was employed in breaking up the taffy berg in the hold of the ship, and after thirty days labor the men at length succeeded in clearing away the last bit of taffy.
 It had taken eight men only nine days to unload the other three hatch ways, containing the major balance of the cargo, the minimum rate at which a shipload of sugar can be discharged being fifty tons per day per eight men. But the combined efforts of forty men engaged in clearing out the taffy pit in the ships hold could not turn out more than five tons day.
 The determination of the congealed mass to resist the onslaught of the for ty men resulted in the breaking of about one ton of iron tools of all sorts, including wedges measuring three feet long, which got twisted and bent like so many limp candles, pickaxes, whose strong points got hattened out; chains the strong links of which snapped in two great iron bolts that got splin- tered like clothes pegs, and huge crow bars that got bent like hairpins. If these twelve thousande bags of sugar had got converted by mysterious agency into taffy their removal from the ship would have cost only one hum present instance the cost of digging out the hardened stuff cost$2,S5O.
 The sugar market has lost twelve thousand bags of fly fancy" as sugar is called at the docks, but confectioners and brewers have bought the taffy, giving thirty-f1ve dollars a ton for it, or less than half its original value; al- togeth her the making of that thousand tons of taffy means loss of five thou sand dollars in the aggregate, but the chip has become famous, for the Char ing Cross is now referred to as the "taffy ship"
 The cause of the transformation can not be discovered. The sugar was loaded In tropical weather, and those particular bags which went wrong must have contained sugar which was in an abnormally moist condition. The hold in which it was stored was just abaft the engine room and subject to great heat The subsequent change of i from torrid to frigid lati- ! tudes, helped to solidify the mass Toledo Bee.