Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 250, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 October 1916 — GRAVEYARD OF ATLANTIC IS OFF BERMUDA GROUP [ARTICLE]

GRAVEYARD OF ATLANTIC IS OFF BERMUDA GROUP

St. George’s Harbor Sinister Refugs—- - Shores are Littered With Wrecks of 111-Fated Ships St. George, Bermuda Islands —St George’s harbor bears a sinister reputation as ’‘the. graveyard of the Atlantic,” and Its shores present a scene of melancholy and desolation not of* ten equaled in her array of abandoned, rotting ships of all nations, nearly all of which in times past brought cargoes from far and wldd. Every year the fleet of decaying hulks, their ravaged and yawning Keefes and sideg growing more delaptaated with the wear and tear of time, receives reinforcements In fresh victims. Such wholesale blight, such vast and hopeless dissolution, has a most depressing effect upon the beholder. The dismal scene, with gulls circling like vultures overhead, seems like death and despair personified—the end of all things. Bermuda’s cordon of knifelike coral reefs, extending twenty miles off shore on all sides, yearly proves the undoing of many unfortunate confused skippers, who by a slight deflection from their course stumble upon this deadly pitfail unguarded In mld-Atlan-tic. Each ancient ruin recalls to the native thrilling incidents of fearful gales shipwrecks and destruction, while the disintegration jf years has obliterated beneath the harbor the last remnants oi yet other fine ships that hare found their last resting place here In past ages. Only a few blackened ribs showing at low tide tell the story of the Amerleaß fufi-riggeff sh 1 p George ~H. War-” ren, built at East Boston in 1864. Soon after being launched she was placed under German colors as a protection from confederate men of war, being renamed Ida. Under this and Norwegian ownership she continued for the greater part of her career. In 1900 she got into trouble at Bermuda and was purchased by new new owners there wha wished to replace her under the. American flag. Legal complications arose, however, and as a final result the Ida, instead of resuming the cargo trade, was burned for junk. In the upper end of the harbor are the remains of the one time Boston bark Lillian, built at Harrington, Maine, ip 1873, and sold to New York men shortly after she stranded on the reefs in 1908 while inward bound with eoal. After being f’oated into smooth water It was found that the terrible battering had unfitted her for further use and she was beached and stripped. The destructive powers of these coral reefs were never better evidenced than in the ruination of the fine steel Lark Filippo Denegrl, bound from Montevideo to New York witb a cargo of bones. She went to her doom some ten miles off shore. Wrecking tugs succeeded eventually in bringing her into St. George’a still white of side apd symmetrical of spar, only eighteen years old, but actually fitted for littlejpiore than the junk shop. She ended her days in lightering coal in about the harbor.