A GIRL STOWAWAY

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 129, 2 June 1928, Page 20

A GIRL STOWAWAY

SMASHES AN OLD SUPERSTITION. Miss Jeanno Day, a young South Australian, who reached England as a stowaway on the Swedish barquo Herzogin Cecilia, shows how, during tho tempestuous 96. days' voyage, she effectively refuted a sailors' superstitution. "The most amusing incident," she told, the special London representative of the Sydney "Sun," "was when I came out of tho hold and stepped on the deck. It was in tho neighbourhood of Kangaroo Island, south of Adelaide, when it was impossible for the sailing ship to return to put me ashore. I must have looked a sight, with three days' dirt on my face, Eton-cropped, with a boy's trousers, and a blue woollen jumper on. "I did not see.anybody until I looked into the rigging, where thero was a boy. He came down and peeped round the chart-room, ovidently wondering what had blown aboard. I greeted Mm with 'Good-morning,' but when he heard my voice ho recognised that I was a girl,' and gasped with astonishment. When he had recovered, he brought the first mate, who was terribly indignant, and gloomily predicted disaster. "The captain, an old Swedish shellback^;, was also superstitious, and said it was:a great mistake to have a woman aboard. For the first two days he refused to speak to me, and every- time I came near he turned away. Finally he treated me in a fatherly way. He said that'hc was.cross because I had'placed a great, responsibility upon him. He disliked me wearing boy's clothes, and gave mo a red serge tablecloth, from which to rcako a dress. This, with jumpers, I wore for the' remainder of the trip. "Tho whole crew, treated mo with the greatest courtesy and kindness, and. good-humouredly blamed me every time we met a headwind, and also when the mainsail and fore-royal' went overboard

i iii a heavy gale, rounding Capo Horn. But when we arrived in Britain safely, the."crow admitted that my presence aboard had demolished one of their superstitions." N ' .