The Potteries Examiner : — 1876-05-06 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE SEA.  IA New York payer says,—" Mrs. Jersey is at the bottom of the Atlantic, her demented husband is chattering to himself le the sunshine up in Rockland county, Dr. Harnmoud is dead by his own band; sod a I strangely escorted man and wife, the daughter ef the murdered woman and the .on of the man who probably killed her, arc left to explaiu to their curious thigh. boors and a host of detectives a drama they do not understand. No more startling story of the sea has come to hand lately than this fragmentary histoty of the woman committed to the waves from the steamship Cuba, November 29th, last year. Nineteen years ago this woman was a handsome girl of seventeen, Rind married a person of 'feeble intellect '—that is, a gibbering imbecile--poasessed of enough money to be called rich in the country. Lost November she left her home , ant came to this city on her warto Europe, as given out. With her was a friend of the family, Dr. Ham. mood, the father of her son.in-law. Here she drew nearly 10,000 dollars in money, and on the 27th of November she took passage on the steamer for Fernandina., Florida. She seemed to be alone. On the first night out she was ill, and a medical passenger came to the rescue and gave her a dose of hydrate of eldoral. One woman, with keen feminine instinct, saw the two tegether and concluded that they were not strange,',, to each other. From the dose of chloral Mrs. Jersey never recovered. All the next day she lay unconscious breathing stentoriously, the brain oppressed to far that death by paralysis of the muscles that carry on the vital machinery was imminent. Had the medical peiSellger been so disposed, he could at almost 4117 moment early in that day have saved her life, for strychnia, the efficient antidote, is in every steamer's medicine chest. He was in her room the greater part of the time. She died that night, and was buried almost iminediately, and the medical passenger left at the first port they reached, thongh he had taken passage for another port. With him went, apparently, the money the woman had drawn from her bankers, as it NW not found in her effects, and is not accouuted for. Now, the problem of the story is. was this medical passenger on board the ship the Dr. Hammond who was with her when she left home for this city 1 Dr. Hammond re. turned to his home on December 10. The steamer left this port on November 27, and reached Fernandina in ten slays, say December 7. It reached Port Royal the day before, or the second day before, and there the medical passenger went ashore. Starting from Port Royal on either the sth or the 6th, therefore, he had ample time to reach Rockland county by the 10th. He gave oust on his return that he had been to Alabama, which would agree happily if he had been seen on a southern train by any person that knew him. If the medical passenger was Dr. Hammond he had every reason to suppose the woman would never again be heard of by her friends. They believed her in Europe, and he believed that he had destroyed that day in her stateroom all papers that could ever give a clue to the identity of the woman so hastily buried at sea. But a solitary envelope had been overlooked, on which was written her daughter's address in Rockland county. That seat the detectives thither, and when they appeare I Dr. Hammond committed suicide. Suicide in such circumstances is confession."