REFUSING TO OBEY ORDERS.

New Zealand Mail, 30 December 1892, Page 27

REFUSING TO OBEY ORDERS.

The crew of a barque bound for Port Chalmers have been sent to gaol for refusing to obey orders. They said the ship was unseaworthy, but what does that matter ? The fact that the ship bound for Port Chalmers was in Adelaide, miles out of her course, and forced there for refuge, was apparently no corroboration of the men's storv. Seaworthy she was; to Adelaide she had got purely for pastime —on the way between Rio and Port Chalmers— the men who refused to sail in so obviously safe a ship must have been mutineers and ruffians of the deepest dye. Away with them to prison ; thrust them among felons ; brand them as gaol bird* for ever more ; vindicate the aristocracy of the mercantile marine ; and above all lick the boots of that sacred personage the owner. Did yon ever read 'The Ballad of the Bolivar?' One of Rudyard Kipling's best. Of course we cannot say if it applies in this casa, but it is uncommonly fine. The description of the fight across the Bay of Biscay is unapproachable. Here are some of the lines:—

0 ! her nose flung up to sky, groaning to be

still; Up and down and back we went, never time for breath ; Then the money paid at Lloyd's caught her by the keel, And the stars ran round and round, dancin' at our death. •

Heard the seas, like drunken men, pounding at her strake; Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer block.

And here's the end— Just a pack o* rotten plate?, puttied up with

tar, In we came and time enough, 'cross Bilbao bar; Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder,

wo Euchred God Almighty's storoi, bluffed the eternal sea.

We cannot say that this ship story at Adelaide comes up to this description. But we have a shrewd idea that if the Bolivar had got into a British port, and her crew had refused to sail, they might have had to go to gaol for six mouths.