Toss on Raft Four Days at Sea.
Twelve of them, ten men and two women, were out there on the Atlantic for four days, tossing on a sea-made raft, and no one in New York knew of it until Charles Olsen, the mate, a six-foot, fair-haired Swede, came in on the ward liner Monterey and told the story.
It was some story, too, this simple chronological narrative of the breaking up of the American barkentine Ethel V. Boynton some sixty miles east of Wilmington, N. C. Olsen said it was God alone who saved him and his mates. None of them ever expected to see land again.
“I won’t tell all we went through,” he said, half smiling, “because, in the first place, it would take too long, and then, when I get through, you’d think I was thinking things, especially when I told you how the sharks swam round waiting for us and we beat them off, hitting them on their heads with our paddles.
“Maybe I’d better begin at the beginning like I was reading from the log. So I don’t forget it, take it down right here now that the twelve of us lived for six days on a two-pound can of tripe and three cans of blueberries.”
The barkentine left Mobile December 26th, with lumber for Genoa, Italy, in command of Captain G. W. Waldemar and a crew of nine men. On board was Mrs. Waldemar and her young niece, Miss Gladys Larrock.
“Just at sunrise,” said Olsen, “we ran into a hurricane that came up from the south. It got so bad that we hove to at eight a. m. until midnight. It eased up a little, but came up again strong by seven o’clock next morning. We fired the deck load overboard—had to do it, and do it quick; she was leaking pretty badly.
“About ten-fifteen a. m. up came one of those racers—you know what I mean, three waves chasing one right behind another. It came full at us and swept clean over. It seemed to curl up about forty feet above the deck.
“That wave tore out about thirty feet of our quarterdeck and carried it over. At midnight we were completely water-logged. Next morning, at two-thirty, we shipped another of those racers, and it carried off the forrid house and the fo’c’s’le deck.
“We got kind of uneasy about the two women. They never said a word. If they were scared, they didn’t let anybody know it, and we didn’t let them know we were worried about ’em. At six a. m. we cut away the main and mizzen sticks, and thought for a while we were going to stay above water, but at nine a. m. we knew it was all off.