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On 17th November 1906 the Balasore of Eyre, Evans & Co arrived at Queens Dock from San Francisco. The captain was William Lloyd of 21 Cheltenham Avenue, off Ullet Road.
One of the crew was a Samuel Archer, a 23 year old able seaman from Barbados, who was feeling ill and taken to the Royal Southern Hospital, where he died later that day.
Enquiries established that during the voyage Archer had been in a fight with Italian Luigi Cocini and received a broken arm as well as broken teeth. Towards the end of he voyage, Archer had asked a fellow crew member to extract some teeth, which went badly and resulted in a broken jaw.
A postmortem revealed that Archer died from shock as a result of the broken jaw, and not in relation to injuries sustained in the fight, which had involved no weapons and occurred on 24th October. As a result of this, an inquest returned a verdict of accidental death, and Cocini was discharged.
