A LATTER DAY FLYING DUTCHMAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 224, 21 September 1929, Page 6 (Supplement)

A LATTER DAY FLYING DUTCHMAN.

GRUESOME STORY OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS.

(By G. K. SPENCER.)

utter a protest, rushed pellmell aft. Behind me, above the fury of the storm, I heard a scream and a curse. I managed to get my balance again, and, hold-* ing the rail, turned about to face a comrade named Stevens who was strug. gling toward me. "Did you see that thing?" he yelled, his face almost touching my own. " A man with'no chin or mouth! I was right by the light —he —it looked like a corpse. A stowaway gone crazy in the storm, mavbe. For God's sake let's find him— it! " He was trembling and breathless. " And the smell of him! " he exclaimed disgustedly. "Like a devil-fish dead on deck for a week." We decided to go forward to the bridge and report the stowaway later. After all, we thought, lie couldn't get away. We relieved the watch at eight bells, and, though the men going off duty had seen nothing of the strange individual, we weren't five minutes on our watch before the starboard lookout reported a man standing in the eyes of the ship, at the very foremost prow, in oilskins, miraculously resisting every sea! Immediately a searchlight was turned on the welter of water churning over the forecastle, but on the bows there was no sign of man or spirit. Whatever had been there must have gone overboard. We thought of the mad stowaway. . . The next day dawned with calming seas, and we blew a muster. No one was missing.' Stevens and I did not report the stowaway, for the more we thought of him —or it — the more strange and ghostlike the memory became. At mess, that night in Bremerton Navy Yard, ' Stevens revealed a surprising thing. As the strange visitor had. whipped past him it had cursed and put a hand to its face, covering the part where the chin should have been. Stevens had cursed him back—and it was Steven's' voice, perhaps, that I had heard above the storm, "I've got it." he exclaimed at last. " That was no stowaway. It was Ladylips, sure as fate. Why didn't I think of it in the first place ?" Stevens was relieved. True, he had no idea whose ghost Ladylips was, or who the material possessor of that strange name may have been. But he did know that a ghost with ( no chin, as ho described it,' had been seen by many a sailor on ships beset by gales. Why was it called Ladylips —this ghost? Stevene did not know. The odd name had come down, he guessed, through generations of men of the sea. Which brings us, fortuitously enough, to: the other part of the duplex mystery mentioned in the historical part of the enigma—to be exact, the hitherto unrevealed fate of the good ship Ville de Paris. The connection becomes apparent at once. For, according to the old log brought home by the s.s. Waulea, Ladylips was the name of the sailing master of the Ville de Paris. It was he who was eaten at sea by his own men at the conclusion •of one of the weirdest • adventures of the sea ever set down. > The Ville de Paris, mounting 104 guns, i was with the French Battle Fleet of 1782 when the British under Admiral George Rodney vanquished the French [ under Count de Grasse, off the Island of L Dominica. The ships' of de Grasse L engaged the British just after successi fully blockading Lord G'ornwallis at t Yorktown, the deciding engagement of , the Revolutionary War. Admiral Rodney [ captured or sank most of the French ■ ships. He then formed a great convoy . of his. prizes and started them for Eng- . lish ports. Among the captured vessels > was the Ville de Paris, which had been ( the French flagship, and which set sail . on her last voyage with a British crew. ) This was in stormy September, and on , the second day out the big fleet was i caught in a typhonic blow of such r severity that of the 20 ships, each [ carrying from 300 to 800 souls, all but . seven foundered and were lost with all t hands. The Ville de Paris was believed . until the finding of the old log book . in the South Seas, to have been among the lost ships. f The newly-found ship's log, however, • tells a far different and less romantic ; story. It is this:— 7 Dreadful Alternatives. The Ville de • Paris was racked and 3 crippled by the storm. Indeed, most of "• her officers and men were killed. She drifted, helpless, far from her course. Food and water became scarce, and at " length the survivors were forced to ' leave her, slowly sinking in mid-ocean. I The ship gone, the log recounts the ad- ! ventures of the survivors—eight of 1 them, including the sailing master,. Ladylips—in the vessel's longboat. They had only meagre provisions, and little 5 water. For days they ran before the 3 prevailing winds, at last reaching the ' coast of Soutn America near the Straits of Magellan. After much discussion they finally decided to land, procure a s good supply of water and such fresh '' food as could be. found, and set sail for 1 China. The winds of the time and place J seem to have been the determining facl tor in the decision. ' Scarcely had they started on their 5 Pacific voyage when two of the men j died from something they had eaten while ashore in the Straits. As the ' days went by without their sighting a } single sail, they fell to fighting among 7 themselves. At last, their food gave 1 out, and they were starving. Desperate, they began fishing for sharks with flanp nel as bait on the end of a boathook. 1 A giant fish took the bait; the starved, ' weakened men strove to bring him to ' gaff, where they might stab him to ' death. Suddenly the shark lashed about, • tearing the boathook from their hands. ' The handle smashed against them, and ! Ladylips, who had been in the forefront of the struggle received it full on the • chin. The log tells how the poor fel- ! low's jaw was actually torn away. He stood there, knowing that nothing ' was'at . hand to save his life —no surgeon, no doctor, no drugs • to prevent bloo'd poisoning and death. His men : stared at him./, Ip their hunger-crazed mind's one thought dominated: Ladylips was doomed. Under his , terrible pain, only his iron will kept him on his feet,.' He read the thought in theii minds. * Since he must go, why not kill him and eat him? It was teVrible, but their plight was terrible. His own plisrht was beyond earthly solution. With a great oath, he drew his knife, so the log says, slashed his wrists, and held them out towards his men, They ' gathered his blood in the cans they used \ for boiling. I In all, five of them lived to reach a 3 remote Pacific island, the name of which I they did not know. The entry as to ii their landing was the last in the log. d Starvation, death at the hands of the II natives, or marriage with dusky tribal n beauties— who knows? I saw on the U.S.s. lvlvpri There are things in this uni--I'bof ™ T&Mr 1 -- Iff Id Am,ri, lln N.S. copyright.) g

"Sighting this island by the month of June, the year of our Lord, 1783, all the survivors of the longboat of the Ville de Paris, excepting only the sailing master, Ladylips, who was eaten at sea, landed and hoisted English colours'." That this startling though concise sentence from the log of a long lost ship, which was recently turned up by the sea on the beach of a South Sea isle, should explain a mystery that has prevailed among seafaring folk for upward of 130 years is, of course, astonishing. Yet the sea is for ever giving up secrets. But that iu addition this excerpt, with its hint of cannibalism on the high seas, should shed clear light on another and even more vital mystery — the mystery of the strange apparition that has been reported on storm beleagured ships of the British and United States Navies year after year—is indeed a disclosure to conjure with. To one who, as a student of sea lore since early boyhood, always has wondered what could have become of the ill-fated Ville de Paris—the first, incidentally, of the two mysteries cited above —and who likewise has been knocked almost off his feet by the ghost that old sailors of the two navies known as Ladylips, aboard an American destroyer at that, the thing is indeed a revelation. Not only does.it disclose to me a hitherto concealed page of history, but whenever I fall to thinking on it I find myself shuddering a little and going back, in spirit, to my supreme moment of goose pimples and terror. Nor am I alone in this feeling, especially as to the goose pimple part. Ever einco that tramp of the Pacific, the s.s. Waulea, washed into San Francisco Harbour with the fateful log in which the name of the great ghost of a seaman with a blank mist where the ghostmark of his chin ought to be, appears for the first time, as far as is known, on extant papers or records, word has been going the rounds of the sea. And everywhere young 'uns have gathered about to hear the story from the men who have seen the ghost Ladylips. An Amazing Apparition. Men of the United States destroyer Stoddert saw this amazing apparition not more than two years ago, and before that others on the U.S.s. Colorado, and still others on the old U.S.s. Indiana, to say nothing of H.M.s. Iron Duke, the Ramilies, the Queen Elizabeth and the destroyer Broke. On the logs of all these ships, as I personally know, the appearance of Ladylips was duly logged. Naturally in this day of pure and applied science, many a man who has seen Ladylips .hesitates to talk for fear of being laughed at, but all of them, like myself, have the uncanny experience stamped on their minds. Can such things really-be? Strangely enough, like so many incidents destined to be of deepest interest, the discovery of the log with its revelatory sentence was quite prosaic. A member of the crew, of the tramp steamer was sauntering along the beach of one of the Duke of Gloucester isles. - He kicked up a book-shaped object, which at first he thought was a "piece of wood long in the brine of the sea, so hard and blackened did it appear. Idly he picked it "up. It was indeed a book wrapped securely in leather. The hide was so stiff that it had to be prized away with a knife. ; Protected by the leather, the pages of the book had long since cleaved to each other so tightly that the finder could not part them, unless he chose to rend and tear them so that whatever writing they contained would have been destroyed. Discerning, however, that here was the log of some ship, probably lost at sea, he took it. back'to his own vessel. There he managed to steam the pages apart, and at last in the heart of the amazing" story they contained discovered the sentence cited at the beginning of this story—the sentence that, dispels the mystery which so long surrounded the fate cf the Ville de Paris and gives a new and eerie significance to the ghost Ladylips. Let us take first the ghost part of this twin enigma, because that is, curiously, personal with me and' more real to me than, the other. To this day I sometimes catch again the odd odour which clings about this ghost Ladylips —an odour that somehow always ■ re-, minds me of the queer creatures that live far down in the sea and its perpetual gloom. I have even been sickened by it as memory brings it back; Psychology and psychiatry may have some explanation for all this, many argue convincingly enough that I only imagined it, that we all imagined it, but I know what I know! My ship, the U.S.s. Stoddert, of the 32nd Destroyer Division of the Battle Fleet, was slowly fighting her way up the North Pacific Coast of the United States in the face of an angry sea. Time and again the raging mountainous waves crashed down on the little craft, cov.ering her from stem to stern. How she stood the tremendous strain is a mystery. Day after day the battle with the sea went on. The radio was crippled finally so that ho messages could be sent in case we were wrecked. Plates of the little ship's thin steel sides, bending under the endless strain, parted slowly, so that we began to ship water. Most of the crew, though they were seasoned sailors, were green with seasickness. For four days' we had eaten little or nothing. Night of the fifth day came on with seas so high we did not dare to try for the entrance to Puget Sound, the heme base to which we were bound, for fear of grounding on the headlands. With actual darkness the strange greenish light kno\yn to seamen as St. Elmo's firo hovered about the ship and seemed to cast a pallor on the sea about us. A driving needle-like rain ; tortured those who went on deck. Since I was .assigned to the-mid watch", which began at'midnight, T had-Strapped myself in my- bunk early that evening. "When time came for me' to go on deck a shaking hand grabbed' iliy' shoulder, and a comrade shotted for me to get tip. I got out as beat I coula, and, clinging to ie passage-rail lest I be,thrown flat by tlio rr g A of * tlie lnade mv way to tl p i • green ]i « ht burned dimly at wtto ; and rain, clinging for irv°Vf '"t +1° U'■ I made my way forward. - . Ic " Did You See That Thing'? » It was necessary to traverse a narrow gallery to reach the ladder to the briidV As I went along that gallery I saw ab ! 7 , j of me the figure of a man in oilskins struggling back from the forecastle I remember I was amazed, for no man could have walked that forecastle and li\e<l that night. No destroyer mai] would have attempted it—at least not ir his right mind! Yet, miraculously pre served, this felffhv was plunging to wan me through the greenish light. Rudel; lie brus#ed against me, sent me spmnin' aguinpt the bulkhead, and, before J. coul