Word: merchantman
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...panic he abandoned a key position-and then hid in a cellar, where he fell asleep on a storage bin. After he woke up, Drake took his first and last decisive action. He strode to the riverbank, jumped into a rowboat, and was last seen shinnying shamelessly aboard a merchantman moored near the fort...
...Japanese naval authorities their story seemed as full of holes as the Leap Forward herself. If the ship had really been torpedoed, they pointed out, its 59-man crew could hardly have escaped without the loss of a single life. Besides, who would want to sink an unarmed merchantman? The U.S. announced that it, for one, had no subs in the area. A more logical explanation lay in jagged Scott Rock, an ill-defined group of reefs barely beneath the surface 120 miles southwest of Korea. The head of Japan's Maritime Safety Board was sure the Leap Forward...
Floating Factory. Months of leisurely study showed the wreck to be a small merchantman about 30 ft. long. Fragments of pottery dated it back to around 1200 B.C., the late Bronze Age that Homer wrote about. Bits of planking preserved under the cargo show that the ship was probably built of Syrian wood and in Syria. She must have touched at Cyprus, the ancient copper center, to pick up a ton of copper ingots, stamped with Cypro-Minoan signs. She also carried ingots of tin, probably from Syria, that have long since turned to white oxide. Packed in wicker baskets...
Tragic Anecdotes. The explosion shot a half-ton piece of the Mont Blanc's anchor two miles through the air. It pulled a sailor off the deck of a nearby merchantman, and tossed him up to the top of a hill half a mile away. Somehow he lived. It tore rocks up from the bottom of the harbor and sent them raining from on high. It sucked up so much water that divers working 22 ft. down elsewhere in the harbor suddenly found themselves standing chest-deep and wallowing for their lives before the onrush of a tidal wave...
What frustrates him for months is that the raider is not a U-boat at all, but a heavily armed surface vessel well disguised as a merchantman. The raider, the Atlantis, flies whatever flag is convenient, and carries its sham to the point of decking seamen out as female passengers-wigs, parasols and all. When a target is sighted, the Atlantis steams close by, runs up the swastika and lowers the false packing cases which hide its guns. The raider's captain, played by Van Heflin, is a gentleman who, in his student days, rowed against Cambridge...