The Mutiny on the Bark Hesper Comes Back to a Seattle Courtroom

Port Townsend, March 31.—Special.—John Lucas and John Langleis, mariners, were arrested by Deputy United States Marshal Quilter today and taken to Seattle on a subpoena. They are witnesses in the case of Herman Sparf, who is charged with mutinying and murdering Morris Fitzgerald, second officer of the bark Hesper, in the South Seas in January, 1893. Sparf was tried and convicted once, but has since been granted a new trial. Langleis and Lucas, as witnesses, were kept in confinement on Alcatraz island, San Francisco, for fourteen months, awaiting the trial. They are now given an opportunity to give bonds, but decline to do so, thereby allowing the government to pay their passage to San Francisco and give them each $1 a day for the time they are in custody. The tragedy that occurred on the Hesper was the most horrible that has happened on this Coast in recent years. A devilish plot was planned and partly executed to kill the officers and some of the seamen of the Hesper who remained loyal to the captain and the latter's wife and child. Then the conspirators were to turn the bark into a piratical craft and overhaul and sink small unprotected craft in the South seas.