Argosy, September 1955 — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

80 Cc. H. MILSOM you have forgotten now. This incident didn’t come out, though, partly because it sounded so foolish, partly because to those of us who were there, it seemed like sacrilege to have it bandied about in the newspapers.” The Samaranda was an old ship and not very fast. If we did eleven knots we considered ourselves lucky, and most days she did only ten. However, like most of those old ones, she was a comfortable, happy ship, and that voyage we had a particularly good crowd, so the time passed fairly quickly. We were homeward bound at the time I’m talking about. We’d loaded a bulk cargo of copra at Macassar, and with the fuel we’d taken at Pulo Bukom we were right down to our marks when we set out to cross the Indian Ocean to Aden where we were to bunker again. This was July and the south-west monsoon was in full swing. We felt the first effect of it as soon as we came out of the Malacca Straits, and although we went well south of Ceylon, through the One-and-a-Half Degree Channel, we soon found a heavy swell which had us rolling nearly to our beam ends. Those old ships really knew how to roll. We used to say she’d roll on wet grass if she was given the chance, so we weren’t very perturbed at her antics. Up till then, in fact, she’d behaved herself so well, according to her previous standards, that instead of continuing parallel to the equator, at about one degree north, as far as the African coast where he would turn up to go between Cape Guardafui and Socotra, Captain Halloran decided to cut the corner and go across north of Socotra. . Captain MacDonald broke in with a snort of derision which, for all that, was tinged with admiration. ‘“ That’s the sort of thing Halloran would do,” he said. He turned to us in explanation. ‘“In the sou’-west monsoon, if you use the Dine. and-a-Half Degree Channel, then you must keep to one and a half degrees all the way. There can be no cutting corners, for that stretch of water south-east of Socotra Island is the devil’s own whirlpool at that time of the year.” The operator continued . And that is exactly what we found it to be. The Samaranda was continually being battered on her weather side by waves driving along under a gale-force wind. She fought for every mile she made, but it was obvious that the weather would have to increase only a little and, game though she was, she’d be driven under. And it was increasing. commicloooks.conn