Word: vessels
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When Victor Hugo, in his most dramatic vein, told the tale of a cannon that came loose from its moorings and plunged unchecked about the deck of a vessel at sea, dealing destruction to the crew, critics crowed right and left that he was the most arrant Romanticist, and that the scene was too far-fetched to carry conviction. Another of his most famous passages met with the same scepticism--the under-water battle with an octopus. Yet within six months, both of these incidents have been performed on the stage of everyday life. Last fall the newspapers told...
...sent many of them to serve on the destroyers that were based on Queens town, three on each vessel, and gave instructions that it was up to the captains of the destroyers to train them and assign them to such duties as in their opinion they might be able to carry out satisfactorily. To my great surprise, I found that, after three or four months' intensive training in actual service at sea, these experienced destroyer commanders considered these youngsters, so efficient that in many cases they entrusted them with the handling of the destroyers during their four hours' watch...
...would have thought that a little wooden vessel, displacing only sixty tons, measuring only 110 feet in length, and manned by officers and crew very few of whom had ever made an ocean voyage, could have crossed more than three thousand miles of wintry sea, even with the help of the efficient naval officers and men who, after training them, convoyed and guided them across, and could have done such excellent work in hunting submarines. We built nearly four hundred of these little vessels in 18 months, and we sent 170 to such widely scattered places as Plymouth, Queenstown, Brest...
...there was silence for some hours, followed by a very sharp ringing sound recognized as the crack of a revolver. This was succeeded by other sinister sounds in rapid succession, twenty-five in all, which indicated all too clearly that the doomed crew had abandoned hope of getting their vessel under way and hand resorted to suicide rather than suffer a slow agonizing death by suffocation...
Herr Kapitan-Lieutnant Helmuth von Muecke, commander of the cruiser Emden during the World War, plans an American lecture tour to acquaint ignorant, eager audiences of the marauding deeds of his vessel. Surprisingly enough, there is an avalanche of protest. An honest raider, perceiving that there is almost as much money in lecturing as in writing Memoirs, proposes to turn an honest penny by presenting to us such interesting, vivid pictures as the blowing up of passenger ships and the sinking of army transports...