Twelve Desperate Miles Read Online Free PDF Page A

too large to permit delightful social relationships with fellow vacationists.” For a hundred and ten bucks and up, passengers found hot and cold running water in every stateroom; “Punkah Louvres [to] ensure warm and cool air as desired”; recreation that included shuffleboard and quoits; and even musicians to entertain the passengers at sea and on the shore.
    Beyond the defense work for which she was coming to Brooklyn, the
Contessa
was here to pick up a load of troops to take to England, to learn what her convoy assignment would be for the voyage across the Atlantic, and to be boarded by one of the U.S. Navy armed guard units that were now being assigned to each of the merchant ships in the WSA fleet.
    Not the
Contessa
, her crew, her master, Captain William Henry John, nor the Standard Fruit Company were innocents as far as wartimedangers were concerned. Not only had they been sailing in the dangerous waters of the Caribbean and the American seaboard for the past several months, including this trip up the East Coast to New York, but many within the company had intimate knowledge of war’s perils. In fact, three of Standard Fruit’s own ships, including two that John knew intimately, had already been sunk in the spring of 1942 by German U-boats.
    The
Amapala
, built in 1924, was a 4,148-ton steamer that worked, like the
Contessa
, between New York, Havana, and Honduras, hauling passengers and bananas between ports. The
Ceiba
was an older and smaller ship, built in 1911 and hauling 1,698 tons. In March 1942, the
Ceiba
was sunk by a U-boat off the coast of North Carolina on its way to New York. Almost home on its way from Honduras to New Orleans, the
Amapala
was attacked a month later—a couple of weeks before the
Contessa
sailed for New York.
    The third Standard Fruit vessel lost in the first months of the war, the one that John had not sailed on, the
Miraflores
, had been sunk in February 1942. She disappeared with all thirty-four hands and no trace, on her way from Haiti to New York, sometime after the middle of the month.
    John was a forty-nine-year-old Welshman who had come to New Orleans in 1919, immediately after serving in the British Royal Navy during World War I. He spent four years working as port captain for a sugar company in New Orleans before signing up with Standard Fruit Company in New Orleans in 1923.His first ship was the
Ceiba
, upon which he served as second and then first mate, before becoming master of his first ship for Standard Fruit, the
Morozan
. In quick succession he moved up the company ladder, serving as master on a series of ships of ascending value to Standard Fruit: the
Gatun
, the
Granada
, the
Tegucigalpa
, the
Cefalu
, the
Amapala
, and finally the
Contessa
.
    A straight-backed and trim sailor, John stood five feet ten and weighed 175 pounds. He had thick eyebrows and kept a crisp part to his wavy salt-and-pepper hair, which he combed back in Clark Gable style. Any movie-star appeal was sabotaged, to some extent, by his mustache.Salt and pepper like the top of his head, it sat abbreviated beneath his nostrils, giving him less the look of Gable than that of a clerk prone to crisp pronunciation and a clipped manner of speech.
    Neither image quite suited him. There was nothing supercilious about him, but he was no dashing hero either. John was a soft-spoken man with a gentlemanly polish that made him excellent company for his ships’ captain’s dinners. He was comfortable in his position and seemingly so natural to it thateven members of his own family referred to him as “Captain John.”
    Born in 1893 in Pembroke, Wales, not far from Cardiff, Captain John joined the British merchant marine as a cadet in an officers’ training program at the age of fifteen. He spent four years learning the ropes on steam-powered, coal-burning freighters before matriculating to the Nautical Academy in Portsmouth to study for his second mate’s papers. After a couple more years in the merchant navy,