"the Countess of Seafield has on board a quantity of iron for the railway at Canterbury, and is otherwise heavily laden, and to this fact we think a good deal of the loss of life and damage to the vessel may be ascribed." So said a Hobart newspaper when a little 432-ton barque limped into Hobart on the first day of June, 1804, her decks looking as though she had been fighting with a tornado. It was a miracle that she ever reached port. Ten men had been swept overboard and drowned, and the damage done by the storm took many weeks to repair. Looking back over the old days, it is remarkable in how many instances the ships that had a strenuous time coming out from the Old Land were carrying "railway iron," as it was called. We speak of "rails" nowadays. It was cruelly heavy stuff.

This Countess of Seafield which had such a wonderful escape was bound from London to Lyttelton, and made a very long passage of it. Mrs. M. Armstrong, of Swannanoa, Canterbury, writes to say that she thinks she is the last survivor of the people that voyaged out in the unfortunate ship. She came out with her parents. She says that from the time the ship left London to the day she put in at Hobart six months elapsed.