On the Sea.

Taihape Daily Times, 5 July 1918, Page 6

On the Sea.

SCHOONER BURNED AT SEA, DESPERATE FIGHT WITH FLAMES, Particulars JthTbvntoS aT sea on June 2 of the five-masted schooner Crescent are contained in Australian papers. The schooner was en route from Sydney to San Francisco with a cargo of copra when the disaster over. took her. Although every effort was made to subdue the flames, the inflammable nature cargo made the task of saving the ship hopeless. On June 2, after a desperate fight of 20 hours, the ship was abandoned about 500-miles off the American coast. A course was set for San Francisco, which was eventually reached, after the crew had been in the boats for 14 days.

The Crescent was loaSSd by Messrs Burns, Philp and Co., Ltd., at Sydney, and sailed on Marchf 23 for San Francisco with 1464 tons of copra below and 360 tons of hardwood on the deck. She was a wooden schooner of 1445 tons gross, "and was 240 ft 4-in long, 44ft beam, and had a depth of 19ft 4ln. She was built in 1904 at Eureka, Callfornia, by the H. D. Bendixsen Shipbuilding Company, and was" owned by the Charles Nelson Co., of San Francisco.

HOSPITAL SHIP OUTRAGE.

The torpedoing of another hospital ship will shock, but will not surprise, a world which has been accustomed tj at least a dozen previous outrages of the kind to regard them as normal German methods. The significant feature of the latest barbarity is that it comes at aomoment when such an influential German as the Foreign Minister is declaring" That the war cannot be decided by military means. It demonstrates quite conclusively that despair of victory has not made Germany penitent, and will serve to steel the resolution of the Allies to carryen at all costs till they have driven not only despair but regret for past infamies into the soul of the German. The Llandovery Castle has been lost in circumstances which have become familiar through repetition. She was carrying all the regulation lights of a hospital ship, and her safety was promised by a German undertaking given in August, 1917, that hospital ships would be respected if Spansh naval officers guaranteed that they were used only for the transport of sick and wounded. For nearly a "year before this the Germans had been sinking hospital ships at sight on the pretence that they wereTeing employed for the transport of effective combatants. No evidence beyond mere assertion was given for this, and when the Spanish Government offered to supervise the uses to which such vessels were put there was a period of comparative immunity under the German pledge. Without warning or explanation the promise was broken, and since~then several hospital ships lave been sunk in circumstances of aggravated inhumanity. In the case of the Rewa, torpedoed in January, the Germans used the Red Cross as a target, while the Glenaxt Casfle was sunk within the area which the Germans had always claimed a free zone for such vessels. The lesson of air these incidents is that Germany has respect neither for her own pledge or for the moral law of the nations, ana in her present spirit is an intolerable menace to all that civilisation holds most sacred. Till there is evidence of a change of heart and a change of practice the Allies owe it to themselves and to humanity to continue fighting.