Word: seamen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This was their story: Russian seamen had spotted the frogman, wearing a black diving suit and flippers on his feet, at 7:30 one morning, floating between two Soviet destroyers. He stayed on the surface a minute or two. then dived under. The Russian admiral complained to the Portsmouth naval base commander, a rear admiral, who "categorically denied the possibility" of a British frogman in the area. "In actual fact," said Moscow, Crabb's secret activities have since been confirmed. The Foreign Office answer was a model of stiff-lipped embarrassment: "Commander Crabb carried out frogman tests...
Author Morison's Atlantic is itself a crisp, readable salute to the U.S. and British flyers, seamen and scientists who met and smashed what may well have been Nazi Germany's toughest and most ruthless service. The measure of U.S. unreadiness can easily be taken by anyone who remembers the near contempt with which German subs sank ships in broad daylight within sight of the East Coast. How quickly Allied brains and guts turned the tide can be read in Morison's triumphant figures: of nearly 13,000 ships that sailed the North Atlantic in convoy...
...FRANKLIN'S PRIVATEERS, by William Bell Clark (Louisiana State University; $3.75), is a brief account of Franklin's efforts, as an American commissioner in France, to capture British seamen who could be exchanged for American prisoners held in England. His privateers, based on French ports, didn't get very far, but Author Clark had better get to the historical novel he has outlined in this book, or somebody else will...
...Desert Island. What had persuaded such able seamen as Miller and his mate, a salt-encrusted American Indian named Chuck Simpson, to abandon a still sound ship in the open sea and entrust their fates and those of their passengers to the doubtful security of an outboard dinghy and three flimsy life rafts? An island newspaper stoutly proclaimed that pirates had seized the passengers and scuttled the ship for the sake of a thousand pounds reputedly resting in the wallet of one of the passengers. But what pirate worth his salt would jettison a ship as fine as the Joyita...
...breast with a flipper that bends at the elbow. At such moments, the head and shoulders of the dugong rise from the water in a vaguely human attitude. Many ichthyologists believe that this-and the fishlike tail the dugong displays when diving-led Greek and Arab seamen to bring back tales of mermaids. The dugong also emits a low-pitched whistling sound as the air rushes in through its nostrils. This may account for Homer's persistent legend of sweet-voiced sirens who lured ancient Greek mariners to their deaths on rocky Scylla...