To the Editor of the "Norta-Cama Dairy News."
Sir,—Following perusal of your paragraph on the P & O. S. Egypt, which appears in your "Notes & Comments" of today's issue, it leaves me wondering as to why editors and journalists, will persist in perpetrating travesties on a subject of which, unless they possess the experience of sea service, they are woefully ignorant. To the landsman, whose knowledge of ships and those who man them amounts to what he reads in Press accounts or highly coloured fiction, your paragraph introducing the "splendid record of Lascar and native crews on all vessels during the War" will be swallowed with appreciative self-satisfaction; to one who has 16 years of sea service and who, during that period, has had the handling on numerous occasions, of the type of seaman referred to, your comments betray a sad lack of knowledge of the subject on. which you enthuse.
Whilst it would certainly be, at this juncture, out of place to pass any comments on Reuter's initial cables dealing with the disaster and the subsequent attitude of the Lascar section of the crew, it is very obvious that the statement made by your correspondent will not "be fully borne out by all who have personal experience of Lascar crews." As one instance I would quote the case of the Ellerman City liner in Malta harbour in 1910, which caught fire, where the Lascar portion of the crew jumped overboard practically to a man, leaving the European passengers to take cave of themselves. Further, I would remind your correspondent that the "Lascar and native crews" he refers to, might have been carried on vessels during the war when such vessels were engaged on duties that did not bring them in the radius of the zone where enemy submarines were operating, but, as regards the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, a special Admiralty order was issued in 1916 forbidding the engagement of native crews on vessels using these waters, on account of such crews' "unreliability" (a mild Governmental term) in cases of emergency.
Without darter cleroseing a weperence of Oriental crews would our n would say at, point to the deduction that, as long as the weather is good and. favourable conditions obtain, the native may be depended on; in any case of emergency he is, as a whole, absolutely unreliable and amenable to discipline only when such is enforced by indisputable methods.
In conclusion I would suggest, with due deference, that when in future dealing with the sea seamen as a subject, the opinion of a practical seaman- (there are many available within a stone's throw of the "North China" office) be obtained on the subject matter. The adoption of this course would
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.