The New Orleans bulletin. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1874-1876, 1875-12-25
THE BRIMERHAV6N EXPLOSION.

!
send a thrill to the souls of those who go
down TO the sea in ships. The last two years
have been especially fruitful in disasters of
the kind incident to ocean navigation. TIE
catastrophes of the Atlantic, the Vile du
Havre the Schiller. the City of Waco and
others have even cast doubt on the capacity
of the commanders of our steam-marine, and
have led many persons to the belief that the
race of sailors has become extinct, and that
the steam vessels to which 50 many lives and
so much property are confded are managed,
not by skilled mariners, but by landsmen to
whom the sea must always remain foreign
element.
Whether this discouraging opinion is true
or not, it can not be denied that the accidents
to which steamships may, without stretch
Of fancy, be fairly considered liable, are
sufficiently numerous to cause prudent man
to regard sea voyage as serious enterprise.
| To be thrown upon q stern and rock-bound
coast, through an error in reckoning like the
Atlantic; to be battered to pieces on rock,
through neglect to take soundings, like the
Schiller; to be scuttled by collision with
another vessel and hurled to the bottom,
through bad seamanship, like the Vile du
Havre; to be consumed by a pms
den fire, through violation of the law
regulating the carrying of combustibles, like
the City Of Waco, are dangers which the pru
dent passenger may be excused for believing
to be always imminent. And these perils are
enough to justify at least mild degree of ap-
prehension on the part of those who are
about to trust their lives in the hands of
steamship companies, and steamship officers.
But when to these are added the terror of
some mysterious catastrophe by which ves-
sci may be dashed to fragments in mid-ocean,
when the sea is mild and quiet, and when the
sky is clear, it could not be strange that the
life of the average passenger should be life
of constant fear and torment. 1t is not too
much to say that, for many months hereafter,
every person that embarks on an ocean
steamer will pass the silent watches of the
night brooding over the chance that the sud-
den explosion of barrel of dynamite may at
at any moment hurl him to the bottom of the
sea.
This natural consequence of that extra
ordinary p!ot-the wickedest, perhaps, that
human depravity ever contemplated blow
up the steamship Mosel-a plot which was
only frustrated by an anticipation of its dire
full purpose, scarcely less lamentable in the
horrors by which it was accompanied than
would have been the consummation
of the conspiracy. Perhaps the his
tory of crime furnishes no parallel
to that which the man Thompson conceived,
and to the accomplishment of which he
brought an energy almost superhuman, and
an ingenuity scarcely less than diabolical. We
have been accustomed to think that the eli
max of wickedness has been reached when We
hear of an attempt to throw a railway train
from the track, or of the destruction of part
of city by an incendiary fire; but, in these
cases, some chance for escape is left to the
victims, however slight at times the chance
may be. But Thompson deliberately planned
and contrived to blow up steamship in mid
ocean, and to bury every soul beneath the
waters of the Atlantic. He could
calculate to second the moment when the
explosion was to take place, and sitting in his
room in London or in Dresden he could
almost count the ticking of the fateful clock
work which was to be the unconscious agent
of his crime. Such crime SO far transcends
the bounds of ordinary wickedness and the
conceptions Of vulgar criminals that our first
idea is that insanity alone could have
prompted it. BasThompson does not appear
to have been lunatic. His motive, it ap-
pears, was to collect an excessive insurance on
goods which he was to ship on the doomed
vessel at Southampton.
Il is supposed that he had accomplices in
this plot, and that his accomplices are in this
country. If such is the case. it is to be hoped
that they will be sought for, detected and
punished with severity commensurate with
the en- ormity Of their crime