29 OCTOBER 1853, Page 13

LOSS OF THE DA_LHOITSLE.

THE foundering of the Dalhousie is one of those sweeping and de- plorable calamities which excite universal sympathy, and provoke keen speculation to discover the cause. Many suggestions on that point have glanced through the columns of the daily papers. One hints that there were Lascars on board—a race noted for a vin- dictive practice of destroying ships by burning or by scuttling, as the shipping of Bombay can bear witness. But is it probable that the Lascars on board should have attempted, in the open sea, a crime which in port leaves a chance of escape for themselves? We do not read that the Lascar incendiary of Bombay offers him- self up as a devotee to a marine species of suttee.

Mr. Edgcombe, a general shipping agent at Sheerness, suggests another cause. The vessel was lost off Beachy Head about E.N.E. from the Galloper Lights. just about that spot, a Netherlands ship had seen a sunken vessel, which it had cleared with some difficulty by a sudden shifting of the helm. Mr. Edgcombe con- jectures that the Dalhousie, in its rolling, may have struck on one of the broken masts of the same wreck; that the stump may have gone through the bottom of the ship, and have bilged it so as to produce a sudden foundering. This is scarcely consistent with the evidence of Reed, the survivor; who describes the vessel as rolling heavily, with an aggravated lurch at each roll, and who had remarked to one of his messmates, that if she had a few more such lurches she would go over altogether.

" One Deeply Interested" conjectured that the vessel may have been improperly manned, and that the deck may have been too much encumbered. Of forty-eight persons in the crew, five were officers, thirty-two were Lascars, four were apprentices, five con- sisted of a carpenter, sailmaker, steward, steward's boy, and cook, and two were "able seamen." And the writer asks, what was the weight of the water-casks on the deck, which the captain ordered to be thrown overboard? 'What were "the deals," which could float away from the ship ?

"W. C. U." observes, that when the ship finally lurched, the long-boat was washed overboard "full of live stock " ; a fresh example of "the insane folly of firmly imbedding the ship's boats between the masts, and even converting them into cattle-stalls, or choking them up with immoveable cargo."

A fifth correspondent sends an extract from the letter of a brother who has emigrated to Australia, and who tells how the passengers in the lower deck were awakened early one morning by finding three or four feet of water in their cabins—a port-hole having been insufficiently secured. Another of the suggestive letter-writers seeks for a probable cause in the comparative inattention which mariners pay to the law of storms. The wind was blowing at S.S.E. with a heavy sea; the ship was hauled to the wind, under double-reefed fore and main topsails, fore-sail and fore-topmast stay-sail on the port tack ; and she continued to lurch violently. The wind had blown from eight o'clock p. m. on the 18th until one o'clock p. m. on the 19th, from S.S.E., and then shifted to S.W. From meteorological data here given, the writer conjectures, that in the state of the wind, the port or larboard tack was the one most calculated "to cause the ship to fall off into the trough of the sea, and to labour most in her efforts to rise out of it." "In these latitudes during heavy weather, with wind from the Southward, a ship should be kept on the star- board tack." Whatever the accuracy of this last conjecture, it is at least working in a more profitable direction than wide guesses as to sunken masts, or criminal purposes in the drowned Lascars. There appears to be no reason for supposing that the fonridering of the Dalhousie differs from that of many ships that have been lost at sea without a trace of their fate. But wild as the winds and waves proverbially are, the laws which move them are fixed, and it is by the investigation of such laws that the same fate may be saved to many in future.