Open Boats

re not told whether any "place of safety" had been arranged for the crew of the Margam Abbey, but her master was approached at Seattle, Tacoma, Panama and Rio Janeiro by certain mysterious 41 agents and offered large sums of money if his steamer never arrived in France. This is the new warfare. When he refused, he was threatened with a place of eternal safety for his own personal benefit. And Robert Louis Stevenson used to be reproached by the "crickets" for his "romantic" aloofness from the realities of our ordered life! My only criticism to-day is that this too real romance, confronted quite squarely by a contemporary, in an inn at Rio Janeiro, looks uncommonly like the bloodiest kind of murder. One of the most curious methods of treating the crew of an attacked merchant ship is revealed in the case of the S.S. La Belle France. On Jan. 31, 1916, she left Port Said for Dieppe, via Algiers, witha cargo of rapeseed, linseed, and barley from Karachi. She was unarmed for offense or defense. All went well till 2 p.m. on Feb. i, when, without any warning, the ship was struck by a torpedo on the starboard side in the way of the cross-bunker holds. She listed heavily to starboard at once, and made much water, the hatches from No. 2 and the cross-bunker holds being burst open. All hands were promptly called to the boat-stations, where the boats had already been swung out in case of attack. No. i lifeboat on the starboard side was then found to be broken by the conc...