A TORPEDO BOAT’S ADVENTURE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1716, 18 January 1905, Page 73 (Supplement)

A TORPEDO BOAT’S ADVENTURE

(From O'ur Special Correspondent.) LONDON, November 25. Jules Verne, they say, used to get the ideas for his novels from tbe newspapers. Did be want another story of adventure, the famous novelist would have found a fruitful source of inspiration in some of this week’s London papers. The London correspondent of tbe New York “Sun” was the first to publish an account of the cruise of the torpedo boat Caroline, which slipped out of the Thames in broad daylight aa a private yacht, and bolted through the Kiel Canal to join the Russian forces at Libau. At first the extraordinary tale was received with incredulity, but investigation has corroborated and added to the details, and it now seems clear enough that the British authorities were cleverly “had.” The Hon James Burke Roche, brother and heir of Lord Fermoy, of the Irish peerage, is the Captain Kettle of this story—“ Dare-devil Roche,” as lie is known in Paris, an adventurer who has led revolutions in South America and fought Red Indians in the wilds of Montana. The ingenious Mr Roche bargained for the Caroline, one of

Messrs Yarrow’s new turbine torpedo boats, as a gentleman’s private yacht. There was nothing so very unusual in. this proceeding. A turbine yacht, built rather on torpedo boat lines, had been fitted in the same way for an. American millionaire named Mr MoCalmont, and when the Caroline was completed in her new guise she looked, in the words of a workman, “as much like a gentleman’s yacht as Mr McOalmont’s did.” So far so good. Then a crew were put on board, engineers and stokers front Messrs Yarrow’s yards, and sailors, who undertook the navigation, from an outside source. Then—at the last pioment, in a desperate hurry, for the authorities became suspicious—the cruise began. The Caroline, with no papers, slipped out of the Thames, apparently bent on a speed trial, crossed the North Sea, got through the Kiel Canal somehow or other, ran the gauntlet of a German guardship -whose suspicions had been aroused, and reached her appointed berth in Libau without misadventures. There the men were paid off, and l , presumably, the ingenious Mr Rocha had the same good fortune. At least it seems that the Caroline passed into the hands of the Russian naval authorities. It is distinctly an awkward incident. For negligence of a very similar character in the case of the famous Alabama, Elngland had to pay over three million sterling in damages to the United States. Even though Japan may not be disposed to raise an outcry, such a breach of neutrality is very re* grettable.