Wrecked Ships Make
p. 75 · Read in the full issue
A Table
SOME skippers go in for stamp collecting but Captain C. W.
Ostenfeld of the Union Steam Ship Co’s. trans-Pacific freighter Wairuna has a hobby which is quite unique.
Recently when a PIM repre sentative visited him in his cabin he brought out what at first sight promised to be a navigational chart but which revealed itself, when un rolled, as a complicated design drawn in ink. Each separate sector of the design had a pencilled number —and a great many sectors bore a name.
This is the plan of a fascinating inlaid table —every sector consists of an inlay of the timber of some ship—many long since wrecked or broken up. Many of the 300 vessels so far represented have had some thing to do with the history of the Pacific. Captain Ostenfeld has notes on the history of almost every ship in the collection.
Anyone with an interesting wreck at his back door —and some facts on the vessel’s history—will please the captain, who is well known around the Islands, if they send along a small piece of its timbers and its story.
Nearly every country in the world is interested in the work now being done by a Dutch committee of ex perts under the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation.
The committee is seeking practical methods of de-salting brackish and sea-water. It can be done now, in a small way. Sooner or later, it will be done cheaply, on a huge scale, and millions of square miles in reach of the oceans will immedi ately become subject to irrigation and cultivation.