Word: merchantmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week's cover story on Greek Shipping Magnate Stavros Spyros Niarchos and the boom in postwar shipping, he brought to his subject an understanding and feeling that came from long personal experience at sea. Mike spent three of the World War II years sailing in all classes of merchantmen, but mostly in tankers, about the Atlantic and Pacific...
Million-Dollar Answers. The Creole is more than a princely pleasure barge; it is also the flagship from which Niarchos directs the far-flung fleet of 48 merchantmen that carry his initial, a sprawling N, on their smokestacks. Each morning last week, while his guests still lay abed, Niarchos settled himself at a desk in his fawn-carpeted stateroom. With an unlighted Papastratos No. 1 cigarette between his lips, he pored over...
While prewar Greek ships were sorrylooking rustbuckets, Niarchos has turned out some of the handsomest merchantmen afloat. To get top seamen, Niarchos pays his Italian, Greek, German and British crews more than they would earn under their own national flags (but less than one-third of the U.S. scale), equips his new tankers with air conditioning, lavish private quarters for all hands, tiled showers, TV, elevators, recreation rooms...
...goes up. He talks of atomic-powered 100,000-tonners in the not-too-distant future. Present-day merchant fleets, Niarchos points out, are never too far from the financial reefs. In a bad year, a ship can lose more than half its value. In the best of times, merchantmen usually work ten years or more to pay off their owners' mortgages. Thinking of his heavily mortgaged fleet, Niarchos claims he is still a long way from blue water. Says he jokingly: "All we really own is the air between the funnel...
...Riffraff." For Nigelock's crew, the excitement was old stuff. A week before, they had been captured by a Nationalist warship but released under the guns of the Royal Navy's frigate St. Bride's Bay. Nigelock is one of a hundred British merchantmen (some under charter to Red China) engaged in Chinese coastal trade. Its crew and skipper expect to run into trouble: war-risk insurance on the China coast is the world's highest...