In all the years that have passed since the idea popped into Doc Adams’ head, the electronics have been miniaturized and plastic explosives invented. Maybe it is time to take another look at the bat bomb. Who needs atomic weapons when we can get the bats to fight the war for us?
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
PRAT 5:
jflrTPI’Ijble st ories
“ruipal
The Titanic
the curse of violet jessop
Titanic. Titanic. Titanic.
Everything related to this ship was big. Big ship. Big disaster. Big legacy. Big movie.
1 won’t bore you with the details of this story. You’ve probably heard them many times. Besides, we are here to talk about the unsinkable Violet Jessop.
1 know what you are thinking. Wasn’t that the unsinkable Molly Brown? Yes, but you’re thinking about another story. Molly only survived one disaster at sea. Violet Jessop somehow survived three.
First, let’s look at Violet’s background to see how she wound up in these disasters.
Violet was born on October 2, 1887, in Argentina, just shortly after her parents had emigrated there from Dublin. Her father died when she was eighteen, so her mother made the decision to pull up stakes again and move back to Europe.
By the age of twenty-one Violet had decided upon her lifelong career. She was going to become a stewardess. No, not a stewardess on a plane, but on a big ship. Stewardess was just a glorified name for the onboard cabin maids that catered to the rich people’s every whining need.
Her first voyage was aboard the Royal Mail’s Orinoco, which set sail on October 28, 1908. On September 28, 1910, Violet switched to the White Star Line and embarked on the Majestic.
At the time, White Star had received an influx in capital from financier J. P. Morgan and embarked on a plan to build the greatest ships of all time. There were to be three of them, the sister ships Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic.
For the greatest ships, White Star needed the greatest staff. Their crew was handpicked from every ship in the company’s line. Violet Jessop was one of the few selected. She was young, hardworking, and attractive.
The first ship to be launched was the Olympic. At the time, it was the largest and finest ship ever to fly the British flag. And Violet Jessop was on board as a stewardess in first class.
The first few voyages of the Olympic were uneventful. The fifth trip to sea was not as lucky. On September 20, 1911, under the command of Captain E. J. Smith (yes-the same captain in charge of the Titanic when it went down), the Olympic collided with the smaller British cruiser HMS Hawke. The Hawke forced its way into the Olympic’s hull, ripping a gash nearly forty feet in length below the waterline. This created a big problem for the ships, but they were both able to limp back to port. Completion of the Titanic was put off for nearly a month while the Olympic underwent emergency repairs.
So? Big deal, you say. Well, the story gets better. Read on …
Being one of White Star’s prized employees, Violet was transferred to the newly launched Titanic.
1 think we all know what will happen on this ship.
Yes, Violet was on the ill-fated Titanic when it went down in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. She was in her room, drowsy from reading, when the Titanic crashed into that dreaded iceberg and began her descent to the bottom of the sea. Being an employee, Violet had no intention of getting into a lifeboat until all the passengers were gone. Another ship’s lights (most likely the Californian, with its engines and radio off) could be seen several miles away and they all expected to be rescued.
It seems that the officers were having a difficult time getting the immigrant women into the lifeboats due to the language barrier. Violet was standing in the background when an officer requested that she get into a lifeboat to set an example for the other women. Violet got in, was handed a baby to hold, and the others followed. Violet’s lifeboat was lowered to the water and launched. Violet would realize the next day while floating around the Atlantic that all those she left behind probably perished.
Violet’s lifeboat was also the last to be rescued by the Carpathia, which had turned back from a journey to the Mediterranean to help with the rescue. The Carpathia returned to New York with the survivors and the remains. Violet chose not to publicly speak to anyone and hopped on the first boat back home to England.
After the Titanic’s sinking, the Olympic was brought back into port for six months of modification. Structural changes were made and additional lifeboats were added to the ship. Once the ship’s retrofit was completed, Violet was once again assigned to the Olympic and set sail. She stayed on board until World War 1 broke out. Violet decided to help in the war effort by joining the V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) as a junior nurse.
At the same time, work had been under way on the third of these great sister ships (only three were ever built), the Gigantic. Since Gigantic sounded too similar to Titanic, the company decided to change its name to the Britannic. Then, on November 13, 1915, the Britannic was requisitioned by the British Admiralty and was completed as a hospital ship. The ship took her maiden voyage on December 23, 1915.
On November 21, 1916, the Britannic departed from Naples and set sail on her sixth voyage in the Aegean Sea.
And guess what? Violet Jessop was a nurse on board. If you see a tragedy about to happen, you are absolutely correct.
While Violet was down in the dining room getting breakfast for a sick woman, she heard a dull, deafening roar and felt the ship shake. The ship had struck a German-planted mine and had begun to sink.
Everyone to the lifeboats!
Violet went back to her cabin and packed her most prized possessions into her apron pockets. She boarded lifeboat number four.
The captain of the ship cranked the engines in a last-ditch attempt to get the ship into shallower water. What the captain did not realize was that the lifeboats were being lowered at the same time. By starting the engines, a whirlpool was created that sucked the lifeboats into the Britannic’s enormous propellers. Even the best oarsman could not row against the mighty current.
A few minutes after Violet’s lifeboat hit the water, she noticed that everyone had jumped overboard into the sea. She turned and saw the gigantic propellers slicing and dicing anything and anyone that came near it.
Violet had no choice but to jump out herself. Unfortunately, she did not know how to swim. She had also made the mistake of placing her coat under her life vest, which meant that she could not remove it when it became waterlogged.
Down she went. (Violet, that is.)
Her buoyant body slowly rose back up.
Crack!
Violet’s head crashed into something hard, most likely the bottom of the lifeboat. Then it happened a second time, and a third.
Would Violet survive? You bet. Remember that we are dealing with the unsinkable Violet Jessop!
Violet’s nose just barely rose above the water’s oscillating waves. She opened her eyes just as another life jacket was floating by. She grabbed it to stay afloat. Her next sight was that of a head split open with its brains falling out. There were body parts and wreckage floating all around her. Quite the gruesome sight.
In the distance, Violet could see the Britannic slowly slide beneath the water’s surface. The ship was not even one year old, yet it went down in fifty-five minutes. The ship would not be seen again until Jacques Cousteau discovered it on the sea bottom in 1976.
Shortly after the sinking, one of the Britannic’s motorboats came to rescue Violet. The damage? Violet’s leg was deeply cut and torn up. She would find out years later while getting a dental x-ray that her skull had been severely fractured, but she had had no clue at the time.
Others were not as lucky. While only twenty-eight people perished, many others suffered serious injuries, losing arms and legs. Luckily, the Britannic did not have any wounded in its hospital beds at the time, or the death toll might have compared to that of the Titan
ic.
Violet was probably the only Britannic survivor to be rescued with her toothbrush in hand. She had learned from the Titanic disaster just four years earlier to go back to her cabin to get the toothbrush if you think your ship is about to go under.
After the war, Violet returned to her life as a cabin stewardess. She retired in 1950, after forty-two years at sea. She passed away in May 1971. After her death, Violet’s nieces discovered a manuscript that she had written in 1934. It was finally published in 1997 under the title Titanic Survivor. Without this manuscript, her story may never have been completely told.
So there you have it. Not only did Violet Jessop have the privilege of being aboard the greatest ships of her time, but also she had the honor of being the only woman to have survived all three of the ill-fated sister ships.
Violet Jessop was one lucky lady. But then, she was a curse on the other passengers of these ships. 1 don’t think 1 would have been able to sleep comfortably if 1’d known she was on the same ship as 1 was.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
goon lim
how did he manage to suruive?
People do all kinds of strange things to make a world record.
The world’s largest pizza. The longest fingernails. The person who can pull a train with his teeth. The loudest rock concert. And on and on …
Yet, there is one world’s record that 1 am certain that no one wants to break.
it is currently held by a guy named Poon Lim. He managed to spend 133 days floating around the South Atlantic in a life raft all by himself.
First, a bit about Poon. He was born on Hainan Island, which is located off the southern coast of China. At the ripe old age of twentyfive, Poon Lim found himself serving as second steward in the British Merchant Navy aboard the S.S. Benlomond. He was one of fifty-five crew members sailing from Cape Town, South Africa, to Dutch Guiana (Surinam) in South America.
So far nothing sounds unusual here, until 1 mention that this was during the height of World War 11. The Atlantic was filled with those dreaded German Nazi U-boats. As fate would have it, on November 23, 1942, one of the U-boats spotted the Benlomond off the northern coast of Brazil and fired a torpedo at it.
Boom! Direct hit! (You sank my battleship would be the cry of game players years later.)
The ship was sinking rapidly, so Poon Lim and many others jumped overboard into the water. Poon Lim had a life jacket on and swam away from the sinking vessel. His wet clothing only slowed him down, so he was forced to strip it from his body to gain speed. This was a good move on Poon’s part, as the ship’s boilers exploded and the ship sank below the surface, never to be seen again.
So here’s the situation: Imagine that you are in poor Poon’s situation. You are floating around the Atlantic Ocean without a lifeboat, struggling to keep your head above water. It’s totally dark, you are butt-naked, and land cannot be seen in any direction.
What would you do?
1 guess all that you can do is hope for a miracle.
Poon Lim received his miracle. Well, sort of.
You see, Poon was treading water, hoping to spot a life raft. As each crest of a wave came by, he tried to lift himself out of the water to see out into the distance.
At first, he spotted a life raft with five men in it. The sailors were picked up by a U-boat, but after a few minutes below deck, they were escorted back to their raft. A member of the Uboat crew actually spotted Lim struggling in the water. Instead of offering assistance, the enemy pointed his gun at Lim, pretended to fire, and then left him to die. The U-boat descended and Lim was quite positive that the sub was steered directly into the life raft. In everyday terms, the men were basically mowed down. When he was finally rescued (and this would be a very, very long time), Lim’s suspicions would be confirmed because the men were never rescued.
But wait!
Poon Lim is still floating around naked in the Atlantic!
After floating in the water for two hours, he spotted a life raft several hundred feet away. Obviously, he swam toward it and hopped in.
It was an eight-foot square raft that consisted of six watertight drums surrounded by a wooden timber frame. There were two open slat ledges on either side of a central well that measured approximately six by three feet. Stored away on the raft were a tengallon tank of water, some flares, and a flashlight. He also found two pounds of chocolate, five tins of evaporated milk, a sack of barley sugar, a bottle of lime juice, and a container of very hard biscuits. Let’s face it, the raft wasn’t exactly a luxury liner and only a crazy person could have chosen these food items as necessary for survival. He figured that if he limited himself to a few swallows of water and two biscuits for breakfast and dinner, he should be able to stay alive for at least a month.
At first, Poon Lim had great hope. He came quite close to being rescued several times. Seven days into his ordeal, he frantically tried to get the attention of a ship passing by. He set off his flares to get the crew’s attention. They did spot him, but once they realized that he was Chinese, they just left him to die. The ship that was passing by did just that; it passed by. (Why do 1 hear Barry Manilow singing, “We’re two ships that passed in the night” here?)
Then he spotted six or seven patrol planes flying overhead. Having no flares remaining, it was difficult for Lim to get their attention. Yet, somehow he did. One plane circled around and dropped a canister of oil to mark the spot and then took off. That night, a violent storm broke out, and Lim was moved far off course. The planes never returned to find him.
Poon Lim quickly realized that he was going to be out at sea for quite some time. He could have chosen to give up and die, but instead decided to use his skills and limited supplies to stay alive.
The raft was equipped with two large pieces of canvas, one of which he used as a roof to protect him from the sun’s intense rays. (Remember, he was naked.) Lim fashioned the canvas roof into a catchall to collect rainwater, which he stored in the tengallon tank. He took apart the flashlight and used the spring inside to fashion a fishing hook. Next he used his teeth to pull out some of the nails that held the raft together (Ouch!) and pounded them to make additional hooks. Then he fashioned the tough hemp rope on board into a crude fishing line. He used the barnacles growing on his raft as bait.
If all went well, he had the tools to stay alive. Now all he had to do was catch something.
When he finally caught his first fish, he cut it in half with a tin can that held some of the biscuits. He ate half of the fish and put the other half aside to use as additional bait for his next meal. He continued to catch fish and dried them on a line that he rigged up. He was basically making fish jerky.
On one of his many fishing efforts, things did not go exactly as planned. The fish on his line turned out to be a shark. He didn’t exactly have Jaws here, but the shark was several feet long and probably just as scary. He pulled the shark in. Assuming that the shark would put up a struggle, he covered his arms with the canvas. The shark attacked him on the raft, so Poon Lim bashed him over the head with the partially filled water container. He cut open the shark and sucked the blood from its internal organs.
Finally, Poon Lim noticed that seagulls were flying in the air. He knew that he had to be close to land, but as you already know, he would still be floating for many more weeks. When his fish supply seemed to dwindle, Lim was determined to catch one of the birds. He grabbed some seaweed from the water and fashioned it into a nest. He placed some of the dead fish next to the nest assuming that the rotting meat would attract the birds. When an unlucky bird happened to land to eat the fish, Poon Lim grabbed it. The bird cut him up quite a bit, but Lim won the struggle in the end.
Then he spotted land. Was he now safe? Of course not. He was floating along the edge of the Amazon jungle. It was too thick and dense for any man to walk through. There was also the new problem of fending off giant snakes and other animals. Since his best tool was a crude knife fashioned from a tin c
an, Lim felt that it was in his best interest to keep floating on the raft.
And he floated.
And he floated.
On April 5, 1943 (130 days alone), he spotted a fishing boat on the horizon. He flagged the boat down and they sailed toward him. The fishing boat had three Portuguese sailors who helped Lim aboard. Lim had somehow floated all the way to the mouth of the mighty Amazon River. They offered him water and beans, which we can be sure that he took very gratefully. They didn’t take him to port immediately, however. Poor Poon Lim had to wait for them to finish their fishing, so it was three more days before being taken to shore. They ended up taking him to a British colonial town in Brazil called Belem.
He spent four weeks in the hospital recovering from his ordeal. He was actually in great shape. His weight was only down by thirty pounds. He had very little appetite and could only drink milk for the longest time. His legs were fairly weak, but he was able to walk unaided. Of course, he had a nice tan!
The British consul arranged for him to return to Britain via Miami and New York. While in Miami, he told his story of survival through a Chinese translator. The U.S. Navy was so impressed by his survival skills that they made a short documentary reenacting his ordeal. They used it for recruitment, but when Poon Lim decided to enlist in the Navy himself, he was turned down for being flat-footed! (1 guess that the Navy bureaucrats felt that he didn’t meet the minimum requirements needed to ensure survival at sea.)
While in New York on Friday, July 16, 1943, Poon Lim was told that he had been awarded the British Empire Medal, which was the highest civilian decoration for valor, and that he was invited back to England to receive the decoration directly from King George Vl himself.
Of course, the company that he worked for couldn’t miss a great photo opportunity like this one. The Ben Shipping Liner Company presented him with the legendary corporate gift-you guessed it-a gold watch.
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 11