Word: sail
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...people of the isles and headlands of the west coast of Ireland, where giant Atlantic combers thunder at the base of eroded cliffs, the ocean is an enemy. Many a fisherman has come back to port wrapped "in the half of a red sail, and the water dripping...
...Jules Verne, steamed slowly into harbor, its flag at half-mast. Only the tolling of bells, the slopping sound of water against pilings, the bitter wind singing in the telegraph wires broke the silence as the first bodies were brought ashore. They were wrapped, not in half a red sail, but in blue blankets and blue plastic shrouds, and Monsignor George Quinn whispered the prayers for the dead over each of them. Mourned a woman in the crowd: "Three of my own were brought back the same way. May God and his Holy Mother have mercy on their souls...
...slim U.S. Navy commander wrote out in longhand a couple of messages-one addressed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the White House, Washington, the other to his crew. His ship, he wrote in the crew's message, was about to achieve "goals long sought by those who sail the seas...
There was no such next time, and young Bisset graduated from sail to steam, eventually (1944) became the gold-encrusted commodore of the Cunard-White Star Line and successively master of the world's greatest sea queens, Mary and Elizabeth. Now 75 and living in well-fed Australian retirement, Sir James Gordon Partridge Bisset sits in the lee of the longboat and spins a salty yarn of life in an oldtime square-rigger. On his first voyage, Bisset was seasick. The mate gave him an old-fashioned cure: a pannikin of sea water poured down his protesting gullet. Though...
Bisset had six years in sail, scrambling out on the swaying yards to clew up a topgallant sail, growing calluses on his knees from holystoning the wooden decks with "Bibles" (big stones) and "prayer books" (little ones). Though experiences in a square-rigger would seem to be of small use to the master of a modern liner, Bisset insists there is no better training. Any man in sail had to learn to make right decisions instantly, he argues. That Jimmy Bisset learned his lesson well is shown by his accident-free later service. On the Queen Mary he carried...