GIRL STOWAWAYS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXI, Issue 8758, 7 March 1907, Page 4

GIRL STOWAWAYS.

Stowaways, those bugbears of the merchant captain’s life, are usually of the male sex, and can be, consequently, made to work out in the coal bunkers the passage they elect to steal. When, however, as happened the other day on the Royal Mail Steam ship Ortona, they_ chance to be women, the case is altered. In this particular instance, too, the offender was a frail slip of a girl, barely 16, and with the prettiest face imaginable. She got a free trip to Marseilles and back, and was petted and pampered by passengers and crew alike, and found only forgiveness awaiting her on her return to Tilbury. It is not always, though, that such escapades are lightly regarded. Not long-sinco a Cardiff girl, who had travelled half round the-world in this fashion, and who appeared in the dock garbed as a sailor, was sent to gaol for her temerity by an unsympathetic bench of magistrates. She had stowed away, it appeared, on no fewer than 14 different vessels, and had on one occasion gone in a whaling ship to the Arctic. A rival of hers, one Lizzie Poulton, had eleven “ stows away ” to her credit when brought up recently for sentence. One of her _ trips was round the Horn from Liverpool to San Francisco and back, a ten months’ journey. On the homeward voyage she jumped overboard one night while the ship was hove to off Pitcairn Isiand, and swam-ashore. But the islanders would have none of her, and brought her back the next morning, greatly, no doubt, to the captain’s disgust. It seems rather hard that so daring and adventurous a young woman should have to serve six months in gaol. But, anyhow, she has fared better than did the unknown feminine stowaway, who a short while back, was “found starved to death in the lower hold of an American grain-laden vessel discharging at Liverpool.