The Dalles daily chronicle. [volume] (The Dalles, Or.) 1890-1948, 1896-11-23
A SEA TRAGEpY.

The Startling Story of the American
Barkentine Herbert Fuller.
The sea has ever been a favorable scene
with romancers for desperate conspira-
cies and tragic crimes. This has been
due to the seclusion which it offers
and also, perhaps, to the traditions of
piracy which hang about it. There was
time when the line of demarcation
between the pirate and the peaceful
mariner was not very sharply drawn,
and the late Prentice Milford who
grew up in seafaring town and had
even served on shipboard before the
mast, once wrote an article mainta tain
ing that the relations which still pre-
vail between the master and the crew
of ship are a relic of the days when
all seafaring men were practically pi-
rates. Possibly a juster explanation
of the harsh treatment to which sailors
are subjected would be found in the
arbitrary authority which law and GUS
tom necessarily bestow upon ashipmas-
ter, for it is almost an axiom that un-
restricted power always leads to tyran-
ny-that nothing but lack of author
ity prevents every man from misusing
it. At all events, the reader of sea
novel expects to meet with various
sorts of mysteriously dark deeds, while
the reader of the marine columns of
a newspaper is regaled with plenty of
actual crime, albeit of a generally COM
monplace and uninteresting character.
The story of the American barken-
tine Herbert Fuller, which the newspa-
pers have been recently telling, however.
is as tragically startling as any ever
related by Stevenson or Russell. The
officers of vessel have often enough
been murdered by the crew, who then
seized the vessel, and it has sometimes
happened that some officer has joined
the crew in mutinying against the cap
tain, as in the case of the Bounty. What
adds especially to the sensational fea-
lures of the crime on board the Herbert
Fuller is that it does not seem to be
known positively who killed the cap
tain, his wife and the second mate.
The evidence against the first mate
appears to rest on his supposed un-
Willingness to make port after the dis
covery of the murders. He is even sus-
pected of having intended to turn the
vessel over to the Cuban insurgents.
What must have been the aStonishment
of the pilot on going on board to find
the vessel in charge of the colored
steward and a Harvard sophomore pas
senger, the mate in irons, and the bodies
of the three murdered persons towing
astern in the small boat! That last
touch is characteristic. The survivors
did not dare throw the bodies overheard
because they were needed as evidence
to protect themselves as well as to con-
vict the guilty; their superstitious no
tions were appalled, at the notion of
keeping the bodies on board the YES
sci; so they compromised by towing
them astern.
Undoubtedly the Herbert Fuller
tragedy will form the plot of many
future sea novel. But no romancer
could have afforded to invent so extraor-
binary a tale. He would have been
laughed at on account of the inherent
improbability of his incidents. The
murders might have passed muster, but
the Harvard student and the colored
steward in their extraordinary role
would have been pronounced simply
mpossible.-Buffalo Courier.