1. "Another coincidence"
Posted by harry on Feb-15th-03 at 11:05 PM

A few members of the crew of the ship Jefferson Borden were briefly suspected in the killing of the Bordens. It was determined that the men were in confinement for mutiny at the time in Maine and thus were dropped as suspects.

I was browsing for information on this ship and came up with a link that surprised me.  It led to, of all places, the Jack the Ripper Casebook and a description of the mutiny.  It struck me as quite a coincidence that a ship which had nothing to do with either case is mentioned in both.

The following is an extract of a rather lengthy article, written in 1875, by the Rev. Harry Jones. It concerned the docks in East London.

"....I happened to be in the Docks when the 'Jefferson Borden' came in, on board of which a famous or infamous mutiny occurred on the high seas in April last. She was an American three-masted fore and aft schooner, deep in the water, being heavily laden with oilcake, which seemed to have saturated her deck. ... When she came alongside the quay I stepped on board. There, in the deck-house, lay the mutineers, wounded and ironed, with the marks around them of the bullets from the revolver with which the captain had protected his wife and himself. He was a quiet, slim, gentle spoken man, with a brown beard, and I had some conversation with him. The ship seemed certainly to have been undermanned, since there were only four men who, properly speaking, constituted the crew. Besides them were two mates, one the brother and the other the cousin of the captain; and a steward, cook, and boy. One night three of the crew, after having gagged the boy, fell upon the two mates, killed and threw them overboard. Then one, a Finn, tried to entice the captain out of his cabin but the captain missing his mates, and seeing that the man had something in his hand behind him - really the cruel iron bar with which the captain's. brother had just been murdered - declined to come out till he had provided himself with a revolver. Then came the terrible time in which the captain, first with pistol-shots, which had plainly pitted the outside of the deck-house, drove the men within its shelter, and on their refusing to surrender, eventually fired into it upon them till they submitted to thrust their hands out of a little window in its. side and be ironed. As I stood there the Thames Police swarmed in, and with stretchers and stern tenderness carried them off to the London Hospital. ...."




(Message last edited Feb-16th-03  10:39 AM.)

WOW!  That was a fantastic post, Harry!  For a few minutes I was there on the dock, in wonder at what I was seeing...
That was pure time-travel.

A coincidence is RIGHT!
WOW

--Did we ever really know if our Andrew owned shares in that ship?  I believe a source says so, and another says no?

It was originally thought that Andrew and Abby had been passengers aboard the ship at the time of the mutiny and that Andrew had given testimony that helped convict the mutineers.



(Message last edited Feb-16th-03  8:55 AM.)

Where did you read this bit of facts?
Why has no other writer on the Borden Murders mentioned it?

Try Rebello, page 120 and the Lynn Item, a Lynn, Mass. newspaper dated Aug.13, 1892.  Rebello also cites "Studies in Murder" by Pearson and Edward Rowe Snow's "Adventures, Blizzards and Calamaties"

As for the other authors you'll have to ask them.

(Message last edited Feb-16th-03  4:25 PM.)