Word: lifeboat
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...subs prowled daringly. One crew, drifting in a lifeboat, told of being followed for five days by a submarine, which surfaced at night and set off rocket signals to other U-boats. The castaways knew why they were being followed: the sub wanted to nail the ship that rescued them. They made no signal for help until the submarine began to lag behind. Then they hailed a passing freighter, which picked them up and made a getaway...
...lifeboat was almost awash. As it rolled and pounded in the 15-foot swells, Desanka Mohorovicic began to feel the pangs. It was just ten hours since she and 23 others in the boat had pushed away from a torpedoed cargo-passenger ship somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Many of the company had been bruised and battered as they tumbled along the listing deck and slid down manropes into the lifeboat. The ship's surgeon, Dr. Leonard Hudson Conly, on whom Mrs. Mohorovicic now depended, had two broken ribs. Mrs. Mohorovicic herself had hurt her legs badly when...
...pangs grew sharper, the sailors rigged a piece of canvas across the center of the boat, against the breaking waves. In the darkness Dr. Conly fumbled with the meager equipment of the lifeboat's first-aid kit-hemostats, scissors, gauze, iodine, aspirin, all drenched in salt water. He had had no chance to grab his instruments before his ship went down...
...righted the boat and bailed it out, found that they had eleven cans of condensed milk, some hardtack and chocolate, a compass and a small dictionary with a map of the Western Hemisphere. In good spirits, they headed west, helped along by an improvised sail made out of a lifeboat cover. On the fourth or fifth day, they sighted a tanker, but the quartermaster, who was senior man in the boat, was afraid to release a flare for fear of attracting a sub. He blinked an S O S with a flashlight, but the tanker did not respond...
...mess boy were left. When his sidekick gave up, Kelly waited 36 hours before he tossed him overboard. "After that," he said, "I laid down and tried to make myself comfortable, hoping that I could die without any more trouble." He was lying there waiting for death when the lifeboat muzzled into a small steamer. His open-boat voyage had lasted 21 days...