Twelve Desperate Miles Read Online Free PDF

he had his master’s rating as well, then wound up in the Royal British Naval Reserve, with which he served through the First World War.
    Postwar Britain offered limited opportunities for relatively inexperienced officers in the merchant marine, so John decided to try his luck elsewhere. With his new wife, an attractive Welsh girl named Bessie Sigsworth, and the first of two daughters, Peggy (a second daughter, Betts, would be born in the United States in 1925), John moved to New Orleans in 1919. As it turned out, John had something of a flair for the American South. Though he kept his Welsh accent, he liked the exotic flavor of New Orleans. He donned panama hats and drank scotch and ginger ale when he was off the bridge and resting at his new home in New Orleans. The family was so comfortably ensconced in Louisiana culture that by the time the war had begun, daughter Peggy was a sorority sister and beauty queen at LSU, with the daughter of Huey Long as a housemate. Wife Bessie had brought her mother, father, and brother over from Wales to join the family in New Orleans.
    None of this, of course, made the onset of war and the move of the
Contessa
to New York in 1942 any easier. It was safe to say that Bessie, ifnot Captain John himself, wondered if it wasn’t time for this old sailor to call it a career. Though John was still a man who stood tall and straight on the bridge, still a man whose orders were issued and taken with confidence and alacrity, his salad days were long gone.

    New York Harbor was a familiar sight to Captain John. Standard Fruit had delivered fruit to, and booked cruises out of, Manhattan for years and kept an office on Broadway. As captain of both the
Contessa
and the
Amapala
, John had sailed to and from the port with regularity in the 1930s. Steering toward Bush Terminal in Brooklyn was, however, a new experience.
    Stretching into the harbor beneath Sunset Park and the sprawling Brooklyn army base, the terminal was a busy warren of warehouses, designed by Cass Gilbert, with multipaned windows and arched bridge skyways connecting one building to the next. The terminal was the largest point of embarkation for army personnel and equipment in the city, and it was hopping on that June day. Outside, dockworkers and cranes loaded one ship after another, as a long line of trains and trucks were backed up waiting to deliver supplies to the docks,including munitions so dangerous that a twenty-five-dollar fine for smoking at the piers was judged not steep enough by the mayor of the city. Within the buildings, a sea of clacking typewriters were manned by straight-backed clerks and junior officers, holding checklists and clipboards, monitoring the comings and goings of newly minted infantrymen waiting to ship off to England.
    The
Contessa
was to berth at pier 1 for a full month as it was prepared for its first convoy voyage at the end of July. Here it would be painted battleship gray and receive “splinter protection”—steel plates—on the bridge and at newly installed gun mounts to prevent the wooden deck from splintering under fire. It would be outfitted with a fire-control communication system, a magazine for ammunition storage, and nine guns fore, aft, and bridge: eight 20-millimeters and one 4-incher. Fourteen members of a navy armed guard would join the crew, which wouldnumber sixty-nine, counting Captain John. In addition, one hundred troops bound for Ireland would board the
Contessa
before she sailed.
    John and the crew could be forgiven for any sense of melancholy as they steered toward Bush Terminal. Gone now were the swimming pool and passengers playing quoits on deck. Gone were the parties, the musicians, and the elaborate captain’s dinners on the last night of the cruise. Gone were the warm-water ports of La Ceiba, Caracas, Havana, and Veracruz and the smell of bananas wafting from the refrigerated holds. Hard to believe, but the
Contessa
was soon going to be a ship of war, sailing