OPEN BOAT MURDERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 April 1917, Page 8

OPEN BOAT MURDERS.

ONE SURVIVOR OF CREW OF 33. The Monarch, a small Scottish shin with a cargo of sugar, ivas attacked by rv U-boat about forty miles south of the I'aUycotton Light, oil' the coast of Cork. The master and nineteen of the crav left the ship in one boat and fifteen of the ciew in the other. The two boats kept together till dark, but at 5.40 the chief oliieer's bout capsized owing to the ehoppv sea and sight of the other boat was lost in the confusion. All hands, after a struggle, managed to regain ti>e boat,, but she remained full of water, with her tanks adrift. Before midnig'lit she had again capsized three times, and one can imagine what scenes were enacted in that lonely darkness of wind and sea. Only four hands of the fifteen were left at the end of the third desperate straggle. .They were the mate and carpenter, and two seamen. one or tlwo vessels in the early morning, but their only iv.eans of .signalling was a handkerchief oil a stock, and they were not noticed. Tile boat was battered to and fro like a cockleshell in the smoking peas, and about 8 o'clock in the morning the two fcMjieii became too exhausted to cling en. They vvere slowly washed overboard. Their faces and hands swirled up once and twice in the foam, and then disappeared. At 5 o'clock on that day, after long hours of struggle, the mate| who was sitting aft, gradually dropped into the M ater in the bottom of the boat and died there. The carpenter was now the only survivor. All that he endured in the long following night and day, with the dead man washing to and fro at his feet, and the dead face looking up at him through the bubbling water, can only he imagined, lie says that "nothing particular" happened. SLOW STARVATION. At nightfall on the next day, after twenty-four hours of lonely battering ami slow starvation, ho and the dead hfily were picked up by a (iriiushy trawler and landed at St. Ives. Nothing was ever heard of the other boat, hut from what we know we can conjecture what happened. It is a tnlo to rouse the Whole civilised world, if any civilisation were left. For these were non-combatants in a small i ship, entirely unarmed for offence or de-' fence, and carrying onlv a cargo of sugar! Rut the most amazing tale of all is perhaps tlmt of the Coquette.. The crew were forced to abandon her. in two open beats, by a submarine which first looted the ship and then sank her. The masters boat drifted for six days and nights. But the chief officers, boat, wit'h fourteen of the crew, was never heard of again.—Alfred Noyes in the Daily Mail.