Voyages to Maturity
Voyages to Maturity
Excerpts from Voyages
"And I was also back in the engine room. Having seen Khyber's turbines, I was somewhat familiar with the general principles of the steam turbine engine, but Mantua is built on somewhat a larger scale, and, of course, was much more modern (at that time relatively few vessels were motor (diesel) vessels, and very few indeed were turbo-electric, as was canberra) ... the work itself was very routine, mainly comprising taking the temperature of thousands of almost unreadable gauges, and, once a watch cleaning the nozzles which forced the fuel into the boilers. This was a horrible job, as it required climbing up the front of the airless boilers and extracting these tubular jets ...
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"(But) on July 31st, at 13 minutes past 1 in the afternoon ... the telegraph rang "Stop" ... I was instructed to go up on deck and see what all this was about ... I was greeted by the sight of dry land; about a hundred yards from the starboard side was a palm-fridged island along whose beach I could see a line of excited gesticulating people. I knew that going back down and telling the 3rd engineer that we had surprisingly come alongside an island would not cut much mustard with him ... So I took a trip to the bridge.
"There I encountered a quite chaotic situation ... I looked at the chart and saw that our last charted position was near the south-western end of Kiltan island, which I noted had last been charted in 1896 ... but about which there was a hand-written note ... stating that 'coral growth' had been observed ... and saw that it was one of the Laccadive Islands and a leper colony administered from the state of Kerala.
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"Waiting for us at the dock as we arrived (at Abadan in Iran) was a delegation of P&O and Shell Executives. They quickly boarded then disappeared to (Captain) Basil's cabin, never to be seen again until they departed en masse, less one of their number. Basil was not seen again ..."
"The first day of cruising was as expected. Although the Bay of Biscay was, as usual, unpleasantly choppy (though not troublesome, Arcadia having been only the second of the company's ships to have been fitted with stabilizers, and these proved to be a big advance in dampening what could be a very uncomfortable motion), and typically for the Bay, it poured all day. Nevertheless, the major routine of the late morning was boat drill ... it is to be recalled that the idea of improving lifeboat capacity and utility first achieved public notice after the 1912 sinking of Titanic. Which was fitted with an insufficient number of lifeboats to accommodate all aboard ...
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"On a lighter note, some of us enjoyed lifeboat drills. These exercises, which all passengers obliged to attend (roll-calls are taken) are designed to familiarize crew and passengers with the route to their assigned lifeboats, and equally importantly, to instruct passengers in the use of wearing of life-jackets. The latter requirement, we found, often proved particularly difficult for 18-25-year old female passengers, some of them were all fingers and thumbs when it came to tying and untying knot. We generally found sufficient time to assist; sometimes some expressed complete amazement at our dexterity, on occasion needing help even after the drill!"