The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-04-28
WINTER TRAGEDIES.
Those Which Occur to Vessels on tn
 Northern Atlantic.

Atlantic, there is a record of shipping disasters to chronicle, and for weeks afterward anxiety prevails as to over- due steamers until they are given up as lost. The exceptional severity of the present season has prepared ship own CTS for a series of calamities far ex- ceeding any recent years, while. now that the mighty northern icepack is in vading the liner routes beyond the Grand Banks, a repetition of mysterious disappearances, like that of the Naro- mic, in 1893, and of the Huronian, in 1902, is wellnight inevitable among the fleets of cargo carriers traversing the great sea road during this perilios per iod.
 The extent and solidity of the foes which overspread the western ocean and Grand Banks this winter outrival the crystal plains sighted in any recent season, sheeting the vast watery floor for thousands of square miles with glittering coverlet, more dangerous for the modern steel built shell than any encounter with gale or pillow. The ice is swept past the Newfoundland coast daily. and reaches even past the south- ern banks. while winds and currents disperse it over the ocean until ships meet it three hundred and four hundred miles from land. Woe betide the craft that strikes it. The ice scores her sides CT crumples her underbody. often send ing her swiftly to the bottom with ev- cry soul on board.
 It was in the winter of 1893 that the .lr aier1af left Liverpool for New York. She was nearly new, in prime condition, and her e,6OO tons of register represented the best science could device in those days. Even if she had met any mishap she should have been sighted or got to some haven within a month, but save for a lifeboat, empty and adrift in mid ocean weeks later, nothing of her has ever since been found. Nine years later at the same season and under similar circumstances, the Allan liner Huronian left Glasgow for St. Johns and vanish ed as completely from human ken. Both were splendid crafts, in first class order and of class that safely traverses these water every day.
 There is at present in harbor here the steamer Polynesia, of the Furness Line, with cavity 28 feet by in her bows, the result of contact with a low lying ice mass, blow from which a few feet further aft would have shattered two compartments and sent her to the bot tom. As it was, her crew had a most desperate experience in endeavoring to get her to land. She was beset with | I1 f1N three feet thick on her decks, and on lv that the wind blew her toward the Newfoundland coast she could never have made a harbor. Last winter the Warwick and the Alala made their way into St. Johns in February and March with fractured Sterns and sides and not winter passes without sev- eral steamers finding shelter here with similar infirmities.
 No less terrible than the danger from ice in midwinter is that from monster waves apparently weighted with a frosty scum that increases the density Iof the water and makes the onslaught Iof one of them doubly destructive to the ship they attack On January the big French liner La Savoie was submerg- ed forward by one of these huge com bers, which smashed a hole through her formost bulkhead twelve feet across and high enough to admit trolley car crumpling up stout stanchions, rails and steel plates, and stove in her side also, the oncoming flood making com plete wreck of the min saloon, and then, sweeping into the dining room be- [ low, among the passengers then at Luncheon, flooded that apartment knne deep and sent the gathering panis- stricken to the decks, thinking she was about to be engulfed.
 Shortly before that the Cunarder Um- bria came safely through a somewhat similar experience. Her promenade
 deck was badly damaged by large
 wave one night, and the next morning another big sea boarded her about the same place, wrecking the captains stateroom and the charthouse, destroy ling nautical instruments and steering gear. invading the saloon and swamp ! ing the berth deck. The Allan liner
 Pretorian, too, in February, was four
 teen days in crossing from Liverpool l to Halifax, having had her steam pipes
 and steering gear dismantled by d breaking sea which flung it's hundreds
 of tons of water over her and left her
 helpless when they wrecked their fury | Before the season passes there will be
 many more eases tochronicle of steam ships staggering into port crippled from
 their fierce battles with the waves, as
 did the Chimborazo in 1880, which took
 in one solitary but colossal sea that
 swept away In the twinkling of an eye
 seven boats; the smoking room, the sa-
 loon companion and everything mov-
 able on deck; or the Austrian, in 1900,
 which was popped by one and had a
 auartermaster killed, a deckhouse de-
 stroyed, bulkhead stove in, and her
 rudded head and spare steering wheel
 torn away bodily.
 | Thrilling, however as are the adven-
 lures of the ships that survive such en-
 counters with natures most violent
 outbreaks, they can be only trivial com pared with the stories that are never Irecorded-the despairing struggles ot the craft that succumb, of the doomed
 men who line their decks and vanish
 in the oceans depths as the waves ioverWhelm them. In the last week ir January, 1901, no fewer than ten car
 so boats left ports on the Eastern coast
 Of the United States for British ant
 European ports and were never heard
 of afterward. Being only freight steam.
 CTS, though they ranged in size from
 two thousand to forty eight hundred
 tons, and flew the American, British
 Dutch and German flags, their loss at.