Word: amethyste
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Early one morning last week, the 1,470-ton British sloop Amethyst steamed slowly up the Yangtze toward Nanking. On her starboard hand, massed for the assault across the river, lay the Communist armies. The Amethyst, with a 17-ft. Union Jack painted on each side of her grey steel hull, plowed the yellow-silted waters with assurance, a frail symbol of waning Western power in China. The Amethyst was to stand by the Chinese capital to protect British citizens. She never made...
Near Rose Island, 60 miles below Nanking, two artillery shells from the Red-held north bank hit the Amethyst, crippled her bridge and wheelhouse. Rudder controls jammed. The Amethyst swung helplessly with the current; she ran aground on a bar near the island. Her four forward guns, facing the island, were useless, but her stern guns began to pour a methodical fire of 4-in. shells into the Communist positions. The shore batteries cut loose again. "It was a bit of a haze from then on," said one of the survivors...
Give It Back to the Bahstads. Within a few minutes the Amethyst's captain was mortally wounded; the ship's doctor and pharmacist's mate were dead. Another hit demolished a rear turret. The Amethyst ran up two white flags in clear token of surrender. But the shelling continued. The stricken captain ordered Chief Boatswain's Mate David Heath and 59 others, including the wounded, to abandon ship. Some reached the south bank in the Amethyst's whaler, others swam. Once on the south shore, they crawled into Nationalist territory. Said Heath: "The Reds machine...
Aboard the Amethyst, other wounded and the dead still lay on the deck. The British destroyer Consort had started from Nanking at the Amethyst's first S O S, to succor the stranded crew. The Consort was flying seven large British flags. She, too, was fired upon by the Reds, and retaliated with her 4½-inch guns. "It was bloody awful," said a Cockney survivor from the Consort. "But we gave it back to 'em. I saw one of their nahsty damned 'owitzers blown right aht of its bloody emplacement. Sky 'igh it went...
...bonds that were considered worthless. But some of them proved valuable. In 1904 he published Smythe's Valuable Extinct Securities Guide. Last week Otto Peretz Schwarzschild, who bought the business in 1930, brought the guide up to date. Listed were 5,500 such extinct securities as those of Amethyst Mining Co., Kowkash Holdings, Ltd., Unique Operating Co. Announced Mr. Schwarzschild: "While the activities of the SEC have curtailed the output of sour securities, it will be a long time before the obsolete security business faces extinction...