Word: lifeboat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...international incident. Survivors' heads were counted when they reached shore. No less than 104 were missing, including the four nuns. Rescued passengers grimly described how those who had obeyed orders and gone to the saloon were trapped and burned, how a mother, clothes afire, leaped overboard, how a lifeboat was swamped by the seas. Some in scant night clothes died of exposure to icy spray and mistral...
Nelson threw us a rope and we made fast. We were then towed about for two hours. They tried first to salvage an empty lifeboat but the bottom had been stove in. They then picked up one poor woman who was clinging to a piece of wood, and an unconscious man who was starfished on a hatch board. He was covered with engine oil and had a great bloody eye. It was my friend and cabin steward, Dickson...
Brady and I were taken aboard a comparatively empty lifeboat which, even so, was overladen. I didn't realize how cold I was until I tried to talk and found that my jaws were stiff. There were a. number of Lascar seamen on board; they crouched on the bottom of the boat paralysed with cold and fear. Poor devils, they longed for the sun of Bengal; it wasn't their war anyway...
...days to return to Bordeaux with her catch. . . . Again and again, we discussed the whole affair; gradually we managed to piece the story together and find out what had actually happened. We learned that the Yorkshire had taken only eight and a half minutes to sink, and that three lifeboats had been smashed by the explosion. We learned, too, of the particularly tragic fate of one boatload. It was No. 5 boat, the one in which I should have been. Several women and children had been put in before the sea had come aboard the promenade deck, and afterwards...
...Told last week was the bizarre bravery of the crew of the tanker San Alberto, torpedoed in two off Land's End on Dec. 9. When they saw the stern half of their ship still floating nicely, they rowed their lifeboat alongside, reboarded her, got up steam and backed toward shore. A rising sea finally foundered their half-ship. This episode reminded sailors of the destroyers Nubian and Zulu in World War I. The Nubian was torpedoed, lost her bow, but her crew made shore with the after half. The Zulu, which lost her stern striking a mine...