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Updated: June 8, 2025
In two thin streams the damp men and draggled women struggle on board. Certain officers, the more helpless subalterns among us, are detailed for duty on the voyage. They parade on the upper deck. To them at least the A.M.L.O. can still speak with authority. He explains to the bewildered youths what their duties are. Each passenger, so it appears, must wear a life-belt.
It turned out that he owned a share in the vessel and worked her from Midsummer to Michaelmas with a crew of two men and a boy. I was to be the boy. We baited our hooks and whiffed for mackerel as we tacked out of the Sound. The wind had fallen to a flat calm. After dinner Mr. Trapp looked up and said to Isaac: "Got a life-belt on board?" "What in thunder do 'ee want it for?" asked Isaac.
He was waving a life-belt frantically with an appealing gesture for aid. "Survivors from der German gunboat Strassburg," came the reply in broken English. McClure ordered them to come alongside and cautioned his men to be on guard against any surprise attack. Out of the gloom came the lifeboat like a weird specter, propelled by the sweeping oars of half a dozen frantically working seamen.
Some were torn and mangled; others lay rolling quietly to the motion of the sea, their countenances composed and peaceful; others were set in hideous lines of agony or horror. Close to the boat's side floated the figure of a girl. Her face was turned upward, held above the surface by her life-belt, and was framed in a floating mass of dark and waving hair. She was very beautiful.
They put me in an aviator's rig with the addition of a life-belt in case we should get a ducking in the channel and I climbed up into my position for the long run, a roomy place in the semi-circular bow of the beast which was ordinarily occupied by a machine gun and gunner. "She's a good old 'bus, very steady. You'll like her," said one of the group of youngsters looking on.
The next thing that the rabble saw as they craned over the cliff was St. Piran floating quietly out to sea on the millstone, for all the world as if on a life-belt, and untying his bonds to use for a fishing-line! You see, this millstone had been made of cork originally, and was only half petrified; and the old boy had just beguiled them.
It was suspended from his shoulders like a life-belt, and carried a deep groove around the middle of it. The Troy captain had a similar contrivance about him, and he looked somewhat contemptuously upon the Kingstonians, who had not the beefy, brawny look of his own big four. The eight took their places on the long board, each man with his feet against a cleat.
"Give me a good life preserver, with a bottle of blackberry cordial fastened to it, and the sea has no terrors for me." She said the proper way to do, in case the ship was torpedoed, was to go up on an upper deck, and let the vessel sink under one. "Then without haste," she explained, "as the water rises about one, strike out calmly. The life-belt supports one, but swim gently for the exercise.
He made a mysterious sign to me, and I followed him, accompanied by mon petit Dame, and leaving my friends, who were inclined to be ironical, behind. When I was seated he opened the case and took out an enormous life-belt invented by himself. I was perfectly astounded, for I was new to sea voyages, and the idea had never even occurred to me that we might be shipwrecked during one hour's crossing.
When the Empress of Ireland went down with a hundred and thirty Salvation Army officers on board, one hundred and nine officers were drowned, and not one body that was picked up had on a life-belt.
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