REVOLTING CRUELTY.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3227, 2 November 1881, Page 3

REVOLTING CRUELTY.

A fiend incarnate has been shown up at Baltimore by the German Emigrants' Union of Baltimore in the person of Captain Moon, •who commands the English barque Cumberland, which arrived from Hamburg, Germany. Paul Lur, eighteen years of age, —ho, although bis. parents were well-to-do people, desired to become a sailor, shipped on the above vessel from Hamburg. The details of the brutal treatment of the boy, as given by himself under oath to Captain JHller, of the Emigrants* Union, are revolt*

ing in the extreme. From the time of the starting of the vessel the captain, the boy states, was constantly under the influence of liquor. The first Sunday out afc sea he ordered Lux and a companion named Robert Henrecks to perform some antics which he had seen in a theatre in Hamburg. Failing to satisfy the modern Nero they were stripped and terribly beaten —Henrecks so badly that he fell fainting under the lash. The .next act of fiendish brutality was to lash Lux to the mainmast, nearly choke him with hartshorn, and throw -him into the bold among a lot of oil casks. After remaining in the black hole several days he was hauled up, and the captain said : " If you will take another smell of hartshorn I will let you go." Lux replied that be would rather stay in the hold than smell the hartshorn, whereupon the steward was ordered to seize the boy and hold his hand over the victim's mouth while the captain held the bottle to his nose until he was nearly strangled to death. He was then stripped naked during a storm arid tied to the mast. Preferring death to the horrible torturehe was enduring, the lad borrowed a pistol from one of the crew and shot himself in the breast, the ball, however, not doing its intended fatal work, but inflicting an ugly wound. While the boy was still suffering from a high fever caused by the wound, he was ordered by the captain in a drunken mood to sing a song. The poor lad did the best he could, but his voice trembled and he broke down. His persecutor then ordered him to go aloft in his bare feet and tar the square yards. Sore 'from his wounds, and weak from tho loss of blood, Lux attempted to perform the order of his brutal commander, but he was unable to climb the mast. After cursing the fainting boy for a while as he lay on the deck, the captain made the steward tar the lad's head and half of his body down to the waist. By this time the vessel had nearly reached Chesapeake Bay, and the captain told the boy to get away from the vessel as soon as became into port. Upon the vessel's arrival at Baltimore, a few weeks since, several of the sailors, who had been powerless to protect the boy, although they pitied him, took him ashore, and placed hini in the care of the Emigrants' Union. The British Consul is investigating the case.—Baltimore paper.