Word: gibsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After the decisive battles come the mop-ups; after the sagas of armies and divisions come the stories of death in lonely corners. The Survivors, by Ronald McKie, and The Boat, by Walter Gibson, have a minor historical importance in that they fill out the sorry tale of the Japanese conquest of the Netherlands East Indies in 1942; but the strength of both books lies in their accounts of how a few score men and women confronted death...
Murder in the Bow. In The Boat, it was every man for himself in one of the less altruistic episodes in the annals of the sea. Author Gibson's gory little memoir, a classic of its kind, begins when the Dutch steamer Rooseboom, carrying more than 500 evacuees from Malaya, was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean, halfway to Ceylon. Gibson was one of 135 survivors who swam to the only lifeboat left afloat, one designed to hold 28 (80 got aboard). Like many of the others, Gibson was wounded: his collarbone was fractured and a shell fragment had lodged...
Many killed themselves. Of these, Gibson reports a "strange feature": "As people decided to jump overboard, they seemed to resent the fact that others were being left with a chance of safety. They would try to seize the rations and fling them overboard [or] pull the bung which would let in the water...
...widow of a British colonial officer who went down with the Rooseboom. She became a sort of spiritual mother for the derelicts. A few days before she died, she took a Bible that someone had salvaged and read a religious service to all her companions. Not long after that, Gibson organized a counterattack against the murder gang and threw them overboard...
Days went by in a daze of weakness. All at once, Gibson realized that there were only seven people left alive-himself, another white man, four Javanese and a Chinese girl named Doris Lim, who had been a British secret agent. The Javanese attacked the other white man and began to eat him while he was still alive. The oldest Javanese died the same night...