The Morrison Co.'s freighter _Vigilant_, bound from Valparaiso,
arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow
the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht _Alert_ of
Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21',
W. Longitude 152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.
The _Vigilant_ left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2d was
driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy
storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted;
and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain
one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had
evidently been dead for more than a week.
The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown
origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities
at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College
Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says
he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of
common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian
of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted
schooner _Emma_ of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th,
with a complement of eleven men.
The _Emma_, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her
course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22d, in S.
Latitude 49° 51´, W. Longitude 128° 34´, encountered the _Alert_,
manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused;
whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without
warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.
The _Emma's_ men showed fight, says the survivor, and though the
schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed
to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the
savage crew on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all,
the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly
abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the _Emma's_ men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate
Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate
Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in
their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering
back had existed.
The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island,
although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six
of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent
about this part of his story and speaks only of their falling into
a rock chasm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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