THE EASTERHILL ENQUIRY.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1583, 17 March 1879, Page 3

THE EASTERHILL ENQUIRY.

[Press Special Wire.] Dunedin, March 15. In the case, Police v Evans, in which the master of the barque Fasterhill is charged with neglecting to save the life of an apprentice, who fell overboard, Mr J. N. Watt, R.M , delivered the following judgment to-day :—" The offence is charged under the 117th section of the New Zealand, und 239th section of the Imperial Merchant Shipping Acts, which are in fact identical. Whether the accused is or is not guilty of the offence charged in the information, appears to me to depend upon whether the boy was alive or dead when he fell into the water. If alive, the master, by his omission to take any means to preserve his life, is guilty of the offence charged. But he is not by law required to take any measures to recover a dead body, however desirable it may have been. The master had no right to consider whether the boy, had he reached the water alive, would have been drowned before a boat would have reached him ; but if the boy did so reach the water, it was the master's duty to make every effort practicable to preserve the life, so long as life existed. This he failed to do, and absolutely did nothing, exhibiting a want of presence of mind, incapacity, or callousness which I hope and think is unparalleled amongst British shipmasters. The facts necessary to be noticed are as follows :—The boy fell with no appreciable obstruction from the mainroyal yard to the boat skid, with the side of his ribs fairly across the end of it. Thence he, or his body, rebouaded into the sea, where he, or it, floated on the side without showing any signs of life to those on deck or to the witness, Johnstone, who jumped overboard. No expert witnesses having been called, I am of opinion, speaking as a jury, that that fall described must have literally crushed in the boy's ribs and caused immediate death, and I am fortified in this opinion by the circumstance that it appears also to have been the opinion of all who saw the accident, for they all talk of the boy falling, but immediately upon and after it reaching the water they all talk of it as the body. Such being my opinion, I do not see my way to convict the accused of omitting to take means to preserve life. I must therefore dismiss the information. In doing so I cannot too strongly roprobate the unmanly conduct of the accused, nor help contrasting it with that of the witness who boldly and gallantly rushed overboard after the poor boy, trusting to that assistance to save him, which was given po tardily and inefficiently that he was unable to effect his object, and barely able to save himself. Marvellous to relate too, there were two life buoys hanging astern, and neither was thrown to the boy nor to Johnstone. The information is dismissed, and accused discharged.