• U.S.

National Affairs: All Hands Saved

2 minute read
TIME

One foggy twilight last week, New York radio stations suddenly stopped broadcasting and the air was filled with SOS calls. While radio listeners wondered what the silence might portend, there was administered in the outer reaches of New York Harbor what might be called perfect disaster treatment. It began when passengers on the British steamship Fort Victoria, inching along in the soupy mist toward Bermuda, heard the bedlam of fog warnings, the fierce, hoarse blasts of a whistle which seemed altogether too near. Then the prow of the Clyde liner Algonquin, outbound for Galveston, loomed out of the murk and buried itself with a mountainous thrust in the port side of the Fort Victoria.

Only one occurrence threatened to mar the disciplined success of the rescue work which followed. A bevy of panicky Chinamen from the galleys of the Fort Victoria started to run amok with kitchen knives. An armed officer quelled them; the well-regulated filling of lifeboats with women and children, then men, continued. Pilot boats, revenue cutters and other craft stood by to assist. Beneath a white pall, in a quiet, gelid sea, the Fort Victoria listed further and further to starboard until only seasoned Captain Albert R. Francis, his pilot, and a skeleton crew of twelve vigorous pumpers remained on board. An attempt was made to tow the foundering vessel to shore, but at length the bubbling water closed over it. Captain Francis and Pilot Frank Moran, last to slide down one horizontal side, were hauled by rescuers out of the Fort Victoria’s sinking whorl. All the crew and 255 passengers—everyone aboard—had been saved without accident except a fainting spell which overcame a Mrs. Nellie Stringer of Brooklyn who suffers from sleeping sickness.

Twice again during the week disaster struck at New York, but twice again was parried.

From the ferryboat West Point, rammed in the Hudson River by a car barge, 700 passengers were taken safely.

From a short-circuited subway train under the East River, 800 passengers stampeded, trampling 89 of themselves but killing none.

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