Word: skipperly
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...opened up with artillery, fired twelve rounds and scored twelve misses. Fifty minutes later, ignoring Union Jacks unfurled over the side, another and more accurate shore battery scored 53 hits on the Amethyst. Dead and wounded lay scattered about her deck. The ship's doctor was killed, the skipper was wounded and soon died, and most of the guns were put out of action. The Communists answered the Amethyst's white flag of truce with machine-gun fire. The smashed frigate ran aground on a mud-bank, remained trapped under Communist guns for 101 days...
...Communists promised not to reopen fire so long as the ship stayed where she was anchored. From her new skipper, Lieut. Commander John Simon Kerans, who came down from the embassy at Nanking, they demanded an admission that the Amethyst had provoked the attack. This was to be the price of freedom, set and maintained in eleven frustrating, tea-drinking sessions. Kerans refused to pay. The steel ship became a furnace, as fuel ran low and the ventilators had to be shut off. As the carefully measured food ran out, the crew went on half rations. To Skipper Kerans...
...Communists delivered 56 tons of fuel oil to operate the refrigerators and ventilators. The 56 tons, Kerans figured, gave him just enough to reach the open sea. He decided to run for it. Luckily the Yangtse was in high water, but, even so, the tortuous, silted channel was a skipper's nightmare-especially without an experienced Chinese pilot. And even if Kerans had the luck to stick to the channel while ducking Communist artillery, there was still a boom of sunken ships to pass, 40 miles downriver...
...turn of the century, the old-style whalers were foundering to their finish, to be replaced by modern floating whale-oil factories. Harry became a landsman, and took up pharmacy. He went back to the sea in two World Wars, served as skipper of troop ships and cargo ships. "But who can find romance," he sneers, "in an engine thump?"-especially while...
When war came, Herbert wagged his tongue in Commons less, wigwagged the semaphore flags on his river boat, Water Gipsy, more. Charged with mine-spotting on the Thames, Skipper Herbert also fought no-hit engagements with passing "doodlebugs" (V1 flying bombs), once scurried ashore with his crew to retrieve books (including one of his own) from his publisher's burning office. In midwar, he traveled to Newfoundland and Labrador on a parliamentary survey, made a report and duly noted that Labrador Husky dogs were "the only modified wolves in the Civil Service. Or perhaps...