The Hawaiian star. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu]) 1893-1912, 1911-10-14


passed life-boat, riding bottom up
on. the long swell The name on he
stern of the capsized boat was hidden
by the water Later on the same day
the Coventry passed a second life
boat, floating upright but almost
awash A sea anchor, made of oars
and SPAR was dragging astern 1t
the end of a painter. On the stern,
just above the wash of the waves,
were the black letters "Naronic." The
water-logged life-boat was unoccu-
pied. No other trace of the Naronc
was found until five months later,
when another of her life-boats was
picked up off the Azores This, too,
was empty.
Steamship men tried to reconstruct
the moment of disaster that had
Iblotted from sight the biggest and
safest boat of her class. The place
where the Coventry had sighted the
drifting lifeboats was approximately
200 miles northeast of New York
and twenty-five miles south of the
Atlantic. There could not have been
a collision, because no other boat
plying in that vicinity had been
missed, not even a Banks fisher. Ice
bergs had not been sighted on the
winter track, consequently it was not
probable that the Inflated steamer
had rammed one in a fog or snow
squall. The sea anchor on that sec
ond life-boat sighted by the Gov
entry gave the only faint support to
speculation.
Those oars and that bit of spar
shipped over the stern, mute testi.
mony to some despairing effort of
men in peril, meant only one thing-a
storm, for no life-boat could keep up.
right in a winter storm on the AT.
lantic. A storm, then, it had been
said the men who tried to read the
rebus of the sea; such a storm as
raises the waves of mid-Atlantic to a
height of fifty, sixty, even seventy feet
from crest to trough. The Naronic
had been overwhelmed by one of these
waves and, stanch as she was, had
wallowed for while, then dropped
like a plummet
Sometimes the sea has sardonic
pleasure in revealing part of it's secret
even while Withholding the knowledge
| that men most seek. A case in point
is the wreck of the Rio Janeiro outside
| the Golden Gate on February %, 1901
This old liner had weathered many {
) tyLhoon on the China Sea, had BAT
: fed the fury of mid-Pacific gales
f when suddenly, almost within smell
! ing distance of her own tarry berth il
= San Francisco, she was snatcheC
under. 1t was during the last nigh
: out on the ships homeward run from
Yokohama that a heavy fog barred en-
trance to San Francisco harbor. TIL,
l ship tarried outside, waiting for thu
1 fog to lift with the morning. He
f crowded saloon was kept alight unit
1 after midnight, the songs, speeches
and jests of folk who found them
: selves happy in the acquaintance o
. eighteen long days serving to spec
@ the hours. Near six o'clock in tn,
morning Captain Ward, believing thu
fog would lift in season, put his shil
cautiously through the smother
Nearer and nearer he drew to thu
black fists of the hills that hold bacl
the land to make a waterway, bu
T. still the fog did not lift. He KEEP
, cropping onward.
, The life-savers of the station a
Bakers Beach, by the gateway of thu
harbor and within the limits of the
| city of San Francisco itself, were
, shocked into action by the hoarsc
! believing of a whistle that morning
; Through the eerie spaces of the fot
: the roaring of the whistle came, ant
E. with it a confusion of cries, all I'm
; earthly in that white world of mist
The lffe-savers ran out their boats
} but before it had jumped the surf-lin,
, the insistent call of terror stopped
abruptly in a gurgle, and the fol
Z pressed down upon the more dreadful
weight of silence.
? They pulled people out of the wa
5 ter, these life-savers and the fisher
men who had Put over to the SCUM,
v of the whistle A few here, a fey
2 there; but only small remnant o