ALL those who love reading stories of the sea—a large class—will find more to interest them in the page or so of disasters," published every week in the New York Maritime Register, than in one of Clark Russell's novels, with the added advantage that the stories are all true. The issue for August 31st is unusually full of interesting tales, and yet it is a record of a summer week. Here is the story of the British ship Bermuda, which arrived at New York from the West Indies on the 29th of August, after encountering a hurricane, in which her crew and passengers must have made up their minds that they were never to see New York again. On August 25th the hurricane struck her at 8.30 a.m. laying the steamer on her beam ends, and shifting the cargo. The midship life-boat was torn from its fastenings, everything moveable about the decks washed overboard, and the saloon and cabins flooded, the coal-bunker hatch being washed away and the stokehold flooded. At 10 am. a sea boarded her aft, smashing the after wheel, and starting the deck fixtures, gutting the engineers' room and galley, and washi away the other coal-bunker hatch. The crew managed to cover the bunker hat= ches with tarpaulins and spike them {down; meanwhile the steamer was lying on her side, with the water up to the fires, and the boilers losing steam; but the engineers and firemen stuck to their work; though they must have expected the steamer to fill and founder at any moment, and succeeded in keeping enough steam on the boilers to give her steerage-way. At 11 aim. a sea boarded the bridge, slewing the starboard side, breaking the iron stanchions and wrecking the captain's room. In the afternoon the water was evidently in among the cargo, for the steamer kept listing to port, and her lee rail was under water, On the morning of the 26th the wind had gone down, and all hands set to work to clear the ship of water and get her upright, but at 10 am. the condenser blew out, and the engines stopped at once, After five hours' work the engines were set to work again, and the steamer was able to make four knots an hour, but all that day and till the next noon she was going along with her port waterway under water; but after all she was got fely into New York, This is a good example of perseverance and courage meeting with success, and there are one or two other cases, all in the same week, in which the crews managed to get their vessels into port after all hope must have seemed to them to have gone, The Herman B. Ogden, a schooner bound from Darien to Portland, arrived at Lewes, Delaware, on the 26th of August after a most eventful voyage. They encountered a hurricane on the 20th of August, which treated them much in the same fashion that the Bermuda was treated, for they lost their boat, mizen-boom, and wheel, the cabin and the deckhouse y, had to cut away their deck-load. The crew lashed themselves in the rigging and hoisted signals of distress when there were fifteen feet of water in the hold, when a whaling schooner saw the signals and came up and Jay by them. Even in the sad plight she was, they did not desert their ship, and on the 23rd they succeeded in freeing the schooner of water, and got safely into port. The Walter 8. Massey, barque, from Brunswick to New York, tells a somewhat similar story. The hurricane struck her on the same day as the Ongden; most of her sails were blown away, and she was driving under bare poles. There were six feet of water in the hold and three of the pumps were broken by the cargo shifting. The next day they let go an anchor, which held, but at noon such heavy seas broke over the ship, filling the cabin, that the crew had to take to the rigging. They determined to abandon the ship, and signalled to the life-saving station at Chicamicornice for assistance and to be taken off; the station replied that the bar was too dangerous, and so, forced by necessity, they slipped their anchor, got up sail and fetched out clear, and after
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.