Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

Can you not see Dolph with his glorious chance here? He drew up papers, confessing to Black Hand plots, payments of money by German spies in saloons in Victoria, drew up papers signing over this imaginary money to the three Pedersens. Papers confessing mutiny and piracy, attempts to poison food, attempts to toss the master and mates overboard, to sink the ship, to destroy the cargo.

“They were brave men,” said Mr. Miller later at the trial in his summation. “It takes a brave man to suffer. They stood there suffering torture because they could not strike the captain — it is a serious offense. They could not refuse to obey the captain — that is mutiny.

“They could not take the command away from him — that would be piracy. They could only suffer. And those who could not endure the suffering threw themselves into the sea.”

Yet, with the penalty of hanging before them, the penalty for the deeds written, to escape further tortures most of the men staggered eagerly to confess and sign.

But one of them demurred and for the most humorous of reasons. What would his mother think if he confessed to such things as mutiny and attempted murder. He had a rib kicked into splinters for that.

But the worst of all they did to Barney Olsen, who died later in Capetown. The crew was spared the sight of the Olsen beating, but they called Mattson in, the one member of the crew whom they could trust to clean up the blood, and take the mangled body out of the way.

What To Confess To!

“It looked like a slaughter-house,” Mattson admitted. “They told me to shoot young Reilly dead, but I told them I would not do that or anything else for them.”

He admitted, however, on the stand that he had been fairly willing to help with the water cure, to give rather than take that form of torture at the hands of the officers. So Mattson stood for hours pumping water onto half dead, half drowned men to escape these harsh measures.

“I’ve sailed seven year with Pedersen,” he said. “I like him. I here want to tell the truth.”

The Pedersens put Reilly into handcuffs and tortured him into signing a confession that he was a German spy. They starved a man giving him a spoonful of beans and three biscuits in six days, then beat and bled him into signing that the food was ample and good and that those of the crew who said otherwise were a complaining, mutinous lot.

And then the cook, John Henry Stewart, accused and punished for poisoning milk, putting ground glass into hot cakes, tobacco in beans and soap into the soup, suddenly, on May 23, went insane under their clubs and jumped overboard.

That sobered them a little, sobered them to act even more cruelly and more carefully.

“He told me to sign my name to a paper which told how well the master treated us,” Frank Grielen said at the trial, “and I refused.

“ ‘Wake him up,’ Pedersen yelled to the boys, and they began to pound me with clubs. I was in handcuffs. But they took them off while I signed.

“With the steward gone, Jim Campbell, never a good seaman, for he was used to coastwise voyaging only, was put in the galley. One night he was dishing up the beans when the captain entered, brandishing a gun and shouting: ‘You are in it, too! Confess, confess!’ ”

He did not know the new devilment on foot, and as they dragged him forth he asked the beaten sailors over whom he stumbled to tell him, “for God’s sake, what to confess to—”

“They’ll tell you,” sobbed one man, an eye nearly gone, with pitiful irony.

They did tell him — with the tiller stick, knives held over his scalp pricking him into submission, and hardly knowing to what he confessed, he signed.

And so it went. The confessions, fantastic, weird, wild, smacking of the pirate novels piled up. The men broken, bruised, half dead, half starved, weak, staggered about the deck or lay unconscious beneath the sails.

Man Overboard!

Then one morning six weeks out of Capetown, Axel Hansen was dragged out of prison and sent on watch. His face was fearfully bruised; he had just been released from the lazaret, and was so weak from long confinement that his movements were not swift. Those of the crew who had spirit enough to turn their heads as he passed by hardly recognized him.

Because it would be difficult with bruised legs and cracked ribs, the young second mate called to Hansen and ordered him to go aloft and loose the royal sail.

The deck was high with lumber, the hold filled with lumber, too, which made the vessel slow to respond to her rudder.

Hansen came down from aloft and the mate called him to step a little livelier.

“I am doing my best, sir,” Hansen said.

The first mate, Leonard, hit him with a knuckle duster. What he said then could not be heard by the crew, who told it later, but presently he reached out and slapped the man’s face and kicked him again and again.

Hansen ran down the deck stumbling, terror of too great torture to be endured written on his face.

He reached the side of the vessel, wavered, looked back, and jumped in.