The Cable-rigger

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 22, 28 May 1903, Page 19

The Cable -rigger

We have frequently made remarks of an uncomplimentary character upon the wdet, and ways of that ungentle descendant of Ananias, the cable-rigger. The caitiff recently worked off an atrocious and circumstantial calumny against the Russian Orthodox monks of the Damlov monastery, near Moscow, charging them with the abduction, outrage, and death of an English girl, Miss Whalley, who, it has just been discovered! was accidentally drowned. The Catholic Church is, however, the cable-demon's principal butt, and Europe is the chief scene of his exploits of archery known as drawing the long-bow. But the specimens of the genus in Australasia are by no means altogether free from the touch of the same old tar-brush. An account of the recent cyclone in Townsville (Q), for instance, was wired by one of the agencies to the English papers in Manila. Tho cablegrammer spread himself out in a hysterical description which might have done for the great earthquake at Lisbon or the eruption of the Soufriere. A terrible typhoon razed the entire city,' ' killed 10,000 people,' 'buned almost the total population in the' debris of their own buildings,' ' houses disappeared in a cloud of dust, and the city was one complete mass of whirling fragments, dismembered bodies of tho victims, smoke, and dust ' And more to the same purpose It was, taken together, a fine whoop.

Our readers will readily recall some of the lurid cable messages and venomous letters that came some time ago from the Philippines The New Yoik 'Sun ' and the New York ' Evening Post ' have just furnished a key to their interpretation of those offensive messages Their sender was an Englishman by birth, a .swindler by profession, and a man with a criminal record, and, of couise, the customary alias The New York ' Evening Po~>t ' say s of him in a recent issue . ' Such glimpses of the occurrences in the Philippines as the average American had during his stay in Manila wero through the ov cs of this confidence man, swindler, gambler, torger, and convict ■ We can now estimate at their propel \aluo some of the calumnies against friars that were sent on the wmgs of the lightning to the ends of the earth by this enterpi using and oily cimimal