The Sun. — 1870-03-26 (London, England)

OPINIONS OF THE AMERICAN PRESS.  The New York Herald says :—The accounts only elaborate the sad story. They do not relieve the first details of any of their horror or put the disaster in any more favourable light. Sixty men were saved and one hundred and thirteen were lost, as at first reported. The infamous inhumanity of the captain of the Bombay, the unanswered calls of the Oneida for succour, the gallantry of Commander Williams, who gathered his officers about him, that they might all go down in line, are all confirmed. No sadder story has been told for many a long day. No braver, more gallant record of heroism in the face of death than that' of Williams, Stewart, Muldaur and their messmates has been written since the days of the British troop-ship, on which a regiment went down with arms presented. The conduct of the captain of the Bombay is under investigation by a naval court of inquiry at Yokohama. His defence seems to be that he felt only a slight shock of collision, which he did not think was sufficient to damage the Oneida or his own vessel, and did not hear the sound of the guns. But his defence is too late to avert the infamy that will attach to him, and the punishment that ought to be meted out to him. It seems probable that merely to escape responsibility for the neglect of his look-outs, or to save his owners from the liabilities incurred by the careless destruction of another vessel, he left to their fate the men who, if saved, might testify against them. The Tribune, in an article on " Captain Eyre's Crime," observes there is something worse than shocking in a disaster of a magnitude for which we have to blame not elements and accidents merely, but the heart of man, which is more dangerous than the precipice and more savage than the sea. The disaster perpetrated by the British steamer Bombay in Japanese waters was a double calamity. The steamer itself killed a ship, so to speak, but that was an accident. The captain of the steamer left more than a hundred men to drown, and this is a crime which finds its measure in the asst which holds it rather than in the ordinary limits of human perceptions. It is waist, than disgraceful to his nation and race—it is a calamity to Ws species. We have only to say in behalf of Captain Ey..a that it must have given him exceedingly little thougnt and feeling to commit his great murder at sea as compared with the thoughts awl feelings which are aroused to denounce it. Of the actua'. commission of a crime more or less in the affair of :.tie Oneida, there is no longer a doubt, we grieve to say. in the remarkably prompt, full, and detailed report of the disaster, which we present elsewhere in our correspondence from Yokohama, nothing is wanting to shew the nature of the catastrophe, and the wilful or careless crime which made the Oneida its victim. Captain's Eyre's own evidence is to the effect that the collision was too slight to be much suspected, that his pilot told him that a spit of land was near and that there was no danger, and that he was a good fifteen minutes looking after the ill-fated ship. That "good fifteen minutes "is a terrible bit of evidence. We are far from wishing to prejudge the case of the Bombay captain? and, for the honour of our race, hope that he will prove himself less a reckless villain than he seems. Let not his infamy, as it stands, obscure the sublime last act of noble men— the heroism with which Captain Williams determined to. go down with his ship, the noble courage of the young. Ensign Copp—illustrious examples, of which a Marine that claims the memory of Commander Craven and the immortal boy Holland can never be destitute when an occasion arises.