Evening Star Newspaper, April 6, 1930, Page 110

pAv — hipwrecke 1HE A Schooner on the Rocks in the Arcti—Life in a Refuge Hut Built of Boxes and Sacks. Unromantic Chaos of the Situation—T1he Danish Patrol Boat and Some Comment on the Conditions of the Weather. EDITOR'S NOTE—Mr. Street- er here concludes his amusing ac- count of the scientific expedition of the schooner Effic M. Morrissey to Greenland. The vessel had made its way through a sea of icebergs and ice packs, when, says the author, “the next thing we did of any im- portance was to get shipwrecked. BY DANIEL W. STREETER. UR shipwreck was not vulgar or flashy. On the contrary, it was entirely subdued and modest, and satisfied all the requirements of good breeding. Nevertheless, it cured us of all desire for any more of this form of entertainment. In the future any one who suggests going out and getting wrecked can do it alone. On leaving Thule we proceeded to Inglefield Gulf for the purpose of picking up some Eskimo hunters and bagging a few walrus, but again found ourselves cut off from the villages by the ice pack. After feasting our eyes on glaciers and ice- bergs of every conceivable shape, we wormed our way through the floes and headed around the north side of Herbert Island. It was late. We had just joined the cowboy in a sandwich, consisting of half-cooked seal meat and sliced raw onion, with the result that when we retired we found ourselves in the condition where “the chrysalis of faint mis- giving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic.” We lay in our bunk and imagined molehills into mountains. Tm we got up and went on deck. A few minutes later we hit the reef of lava. There was just a series of nasty bumps as our keel locked itself into the jagged spikes of a volcanic picket fence. That was all. There were no crashing spars, wild screams, frenzied humanity fighting for life or any of the natural con- comitants of shipwrecks. Nevertheless, we were fastened to that reef with an irrevocable permanency. We had become an integral part of the local geology. The chief was asleep. As we shook him, such was our ignorance, the whole affair seemied exceedingly ludicrous. i “What's the matter?” he said sleepily. “The funniest thing has just happened.” “Yes?” “We've just climbed up on top of a lot of rocks.” . In two minutes every one was on deck. The next 36 hours were sheer unromantic chaos, full of nothing but insomnia and grueling labor. >.The tide was at flood when the schooner struck, so immediately three anchors were run out and all hands called to the levers of the capstan. Then the engine was set at full speed ahead and a titanic effort made to pull her off.’ We might just as well have attempted to move Pikes Peak. Now the tide began to go out. It was very annoying. In 12 hours another tide would rise and float us off, however, so why worry! ‘We would just have to wait. During the inter- mission we went ashore to stretch our legs. There was a rocky beach, a narrow patch of greetisward from which rose a high and very nude mountain and the ruins of three sodigloos. That was all. The schooner was nicely balanced on a knife edge of lava at a point just abaft her mainmast. So, as the tide receded, her bow gradually sub- merged itself in deep water while her stern climbed up in the air until it looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Finally, as though she was thoroughly bored with the whole business, she rolled over on her side until her deck was just & few degrees less than vertical. This precipitated an avanlanche of miscellaneous cargo and personal effects that wouldn't have been nice to be buried under. Then she began to fill with Arctic sea water, strongly impreg- nated with black, fetid, oily bilge. In this pleas- ant mixture most of our books, clothes, instru- ments, cutlery and crockery were soon swal- lowed up. Of course she couldn’t go to the bottom. She was luted too securely to the rocks. But any * ordinarily playful Summer breeze was all that was needed to saw her in two in the middle. Her false keel had vanished already, while the planking on her port side was gnawed to shreds. One of the saddest sights in the world is @ ship in distress, especially a sailing ship where slack shrouds and tangled ropes add a mourn- ful touch to the general appearance of deso- lation. The Effie M. Morrissey was no excep- tion. She looked completely abandoned, the frowzy, tousled, inebriated wreck of a lost soul, If she had possessed the gift of vocal expres- sion her wails of anguish would have filled Inglefield Gulf with mournful echoes. But she suffered in silence, ARD-BOILED sea captains, who would think nothing of seeing a sailor fall from the crosstrees or decapitated by a running rope, are generally softened to the point of sheer sentimentality by the loss of their ships. Some go down with them, others burst into wild fits of weeping, all are the last to leave. Our wreck wasn't sentimental, however. It seemed to revolve entirely around manual labor. The first 12 hours were spent lashing empty fuel casks under the schooner’s stern and lug- ging her stone ballast and movable deck cargo to the forecastle, with the object of depressing her bow and lifting her keel out of the vise on the next flood tide. Then we went ashore for a mug up. There was no solid food, as it was impossible to reach the stores while she was standing on her head. If she broke up, all we had to do was row south along the coast to Upernivik, a little regatta of some 500 miles. From there we could catch a boat to Denmark in the Autumn, The new tide rose higher. Gradually the deck became level. Old Tom Gushue: leaned over the rail with a long pole, notched to show the level of the water when we went aground. The tide was in! For 30 minutes we strained on the anchors. The engine sounded as though it was about to blow up. Then Tom straight- ened up. “You might as well give over,” he said. “This tide's 2 feet lower than the last.” We were stuck harder than ever. Now we “abandoned ship.” Every movable object was passed over the side and rafted ashore. We emerged from this experience with our minds definitely made up that we would rather become a public charge than earn our living as a stevedore. As we were transferring the supplies the skipper stood over a pile of boxes. “Look alive, here you fellows,” he bawled. “Get this Mar- coni outfit ashore and be so-and-so quick about it. The such-and-such contraption may save us a this-and-that long row, so be high-tiddle- te-i-ti careful of it.” We looked at the boxes with a new interest. The labels on them read: “Macaroni.” They were promptly landed on the beach with the veneration to which they were entitled. ‘When the. schooner was cleared of everything that even faintly resembled food, we joined the chief and the skipper in the after cabin for the purpose of removing the ship’s papers, compass, quadrant and other items of interest that might turn up. The tide was out and the floor tilted at such an angle we stood with our feet on the port lockers and leaned our backs against it. Now we discovered that the skipper’s trousers had “gone <vest.” He had caught them on a nail and ripped them from “keel to main truck,” as he expressed it. After considerable acrobatic climbing the chief dug out a pair of white flannels. They were passed to the skipper. He got them half on before giving up. “What do you think I am— a blooming eel?” he exploded. “Won't some one hand me a pair of trousers with some slack in ’em?” We reached him a pair of ours. “That’s more like it,” he exclaimed with a sigh of relief, as he slipped them on. “There’s plenty of play in these.” We were temperately flattered. 'HE supplies, as they arrived on the beach, were stacked to form the walls of a refuge hut, the roof of which consisted of a spare sail. It was strange, but roomy. In preparing a meal all that it was necessary for Billy the cook to do was reach up and pull the proper ingredients down from the walls. Its fane was constructed from sacks of onions, its nave from hams and flitches of bacon, while the archi- tecture of the basilica leaned strongly toward early canned tomatoes influenced slightly by spaghetti. There was room for all of us and to spare. Now that we were snugly located on a pile of rocks about 700 miles from the Pole, with every prospect that before long it would be a case of every man for himself, one almost unconsciously began to look his companions over with an appraising eye. What would they do when the veneer of civilization was knocked off and all that re- mained were the savage, primitive instincts of self-preservation? Nobody cared. At the moment a few hours’ sleep seemed much more important than anything else. We could also have done with a dish of ham and eggs. However, that isn't the way wrecks are man- aged apparently. So midnight found us all back on the schooner preparing for a final ef- fort. This time the jib, jumbo and foresail were raised to encourage the engine. We manned the windlass. Old Tom.with his meas- uring stick hung over the side. “Give her everything you've got!” yelled the skipper. We strained and struggled, the air became blue with vivid language. The paid hands cursed with the fluency of professionals. With the diffidence natural to amateurs we followed them as best we could. Perspiration dripped from us. It was no use. Now the skipper briefly gave his views on SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, APRIL 6, 1930. S— d 700 Miles From the Pole — One of the saddest sights in the world is a ship in distress. theology, geology, zoology and the schooner, with special reference to the polar regions. “All right,” he concluded, “if this is where she wants to stay we'll pull the ‘sticks out of her and make a permanent job of it. Raise the mainsail.” It was done, just in time to catch the full effect of a squall. The sea rose. The schooner heeled over until her scuppers were under water. The skipper yelled like a madman. She quivered—bumped twice—hesitated and slipped off the reef into deep water. For a few minutes we stood around and looked at each other. Then the schooner sud- denly brought up at the end of the anchor chain and jibed. That reminded us to heave the enchor, All the stone ballast was piled on her forecastle, so she rode with her stern high out of water like a Spanish galleon. The skipper, who had been without sleep for 48 hours, drowsed with his hand on the wheel, Our course became serpentine, & The chief, the cabin boy and cowboy dropped into the launch and made for the refuge hut ashore. Nobody even waved good-by to them. Yet that was the last we saw of them for three days. We crawled around Northumberland Island. “There are still two anchors out,” some one remarked looking over the side. “That'll save us lowering them when we arrive where we're going,” was the answer. Once we looked back at the skipper. He was alone at the wheel, talking to himself with a great earnestness. Suddenl; he burst into laughter—uncontrollable, side-splitting laughter. Evidently he had just recalled some rather grim pleasantry. Some one came up from below. “She's leaking like a funnel,” he said, then stretched out on the roof of the after cabin and went to sleep. A’r length we came to rest in a shallow bay on the north side of the island about 12 miles from the refuge hut. Billy the Cook, broth of a boy that he was, resuscitated the fire in the galley stove and actually produced ham and eggs from emergency stores that had been left on board. As we ate the water rose over the floor of the main cabin. This suggested action. “You'd better divide . into shifts and go to it,” announced the skip- per, and now for the first time a bilge pump entered our lives. Abaft the mainmast there were two of these instruments of torture on the schooner. Colum- bus probably had a pair just like them on the Santa Maria. They were direct descendants of the type used by Ulysses on his Odyssey. In fact, Noah was precbably familiar with the original model. As bilge pumps they were marvelous air suckers. A four-hour trick on the levers of our particular samples was a hydraulic picnic absolutely devoid of inspira- tion. It produced cerebral petrifaction. With dizzy rapidity one’s intelligence quotient dropped to zero. In the fact that the hypnotic rhythm was a positive cure for insomnia lay their sole virtue. We only had to take care of about 15 gal- lons a minute, so one man easily kept the water under control. Yet even that insignificant trickle amounted to 900 gallons an hour, or.21,600 a day, so for the 10.days we devoted fo the matter, 21,600 e e = i gallons of the best that Baffin Bay could pro- duce were pumped through the porous bottom of the schooner. Each man developed a system of his own— either pumping furiously 15 minutes and rest- ing 30, or applying a slow but continuous suc- tion. Both systems had its defenders. But the most practical method was to dry her up, then wait in the galley till the water rose so high somebody in the main cabin got his feet wet and began to complain, ‘The skipper lay in his bunk a long time the first morning listening to somebody re- arranging the oil casks over his head. “It's a queer thing,” he remarked, at length, to the deck above him, “in the Arctic there's odorless flowers and down home there’s what you might call lawless laws. I wish to glory there was such a thing as a noiseless noise. I'd like to get a bit of sleep.” A boatload of Eskimos suddenly appeared from nowhere. It contained an old Peary man named Poodluna and his family of husky young men and women. They came aboard and promptly went to sleep in a small bin in the engine room, eight of them i damp skin clothing using each other as pillows. When not engaged in gastronomic excesses their wak- ing moments were employed in useful labor about the schooner. The second day the food ran out with a bang. This stirred us to action, so we hove anchor and started back to the supplies. But no sooner did we leave our shelter than a strong south wind drove us back again and there we lay for another day. In some mys- terlous manner Billy the Cook produced sare dines out of the air. They were kippered for breakfast, grilled for lunch and served for supper in their natural state. A’l‘ length, toward the end of the third day, a couple of dark specks appeared against the white background of a glacier. They grew larger, took on definite form until finally the glasses revealed the cowboy and the chief plodding down the mountainside to the beach. “Where’s the cabin boy?” some one asked the chief as he climbed aboard. “Left him in the hut,” he replied. “Slightly delirious with a temperature of 105 degrees. Looks like a touch of bronchitis. You fellows disappeared without leaving any address. For all we know you might have gone off some place and foundered, so we decided to find out.” The thought of the cabin boy lying alone in that desolate spot, waking the echoes with his delirious babble, was not pleasant. He seemed a long way from home. We hove anchor at once, and in spite of a boisterous wind two hours later dropped the hook off the refuge hut. Then it was only a matter of minutes before the doctor had him in bed. The cabin boy slept. Silence, slightly tinged with defeat, scttled over the schooner. We turned our backs on the north. The skipper was decupied by the single prob- lem of beaching the schooner, stuffing her wounds with oakum and staggering home as rapidly as possible. It was a sound idea, but it now developed there wasn’t a beach in the Continued on Twenty-second Page S, S — SEPSRPA—