"I Spy"

Last week two Coast Guard cutters, the Tampa, the Modoc, sailed north to play "I spy" with icebergs. They are to patrol steamship lanes, chart location of icebergs, figure the speed and direction of iceberg-drift, issue warning to Atlantic liners. Though equipped with mines designed to blow icebergs to pieces, they often find bergs which explosives can hardly injure. An iceberg may contain 36,000,000 tons of ice, eight-ninths of which are below the surface of the water. When dynamited, a giant berg merely loses a few large chunks, which then become small bergs, or "growlers," and float faithfully along with the mother-berg. Thus the Tampa and Modoc are detectors rather than destroyers.

In April, 1912, nobody followed icebergs, which drifted free, unchaperoned. One drifted into the liner Titanic, then the pride of the White Star Line. The Titanic sank with 1,513 people. Now, in April, 1927, with transatlantic travel reaching its spring height, with glacier-born icebergs drifting busily south, the Tampa, the Modoc sail northward, charged with preventing a repetition of the Titanic disaster.