LIFE OF ADVENTURE

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXI, 12 August 1921, Page 6

LIFE OF ADVENTURE

THE STORY OF CAPTAIN EVANS.

Adventure has played about the career of Captain Evans like lightning round a ship in a storm. He has the “Nelson touch” not only for getting into tight corners but for getting well out of them. He is the kind of man most Englishmen would like to be. But while most of us languish for fame ho has steadily pursued duty and fame has embraced him with her gleaming arms.

A man of the medium height, as a lad wiry, but even now when nearing forty owing his physical prowess to perfect training rather than weight or strength, he has the half alert, half sleepy eye of the sailor, a vivid way of talking, no shyness, and an appalling directness and simplicity, as his wife, now on her way with their boy to join him on the China station, can tell.

He met her in Christiania, the acknowledged beauty of her social circle. •* I mean to marry a man of action,” she said.

“ Why don’t you?” he asked. " No one has asked ” “Righto,” said Evans, and they married

When he heard that Scott was going to the Antarctic he went oft the same night, and before he went to bed had made good his claim to a place. He justified it later by bravery and brains. He was no great scholar at school, but he was a “ sharp lad.” He inherited his barrister father’s legal clear-head-edness, but he would have nothing to do with the law. His father, however, was an ardent yachtsman, and along the South Coast he gained an amphibian acquaintance with salt water, risking his life, ruining his clothes and his parents’ nerves with his exploits.

After his first trip in the ship that went in vain to rescue Scott’s Discovery he came back and qualified by study to navigate any ship afloat. Then he was chosen as chief navigating officer to Scott’s expedition, and finally Scott took him as the leader of the last of his supporting parties. Falling into crevasses to the length, of his harness, and so hanging by the weight of the sledge, having bidden good-bye to Scott and catching scurvy so badly that he had to be dragged back by his two comrades to safety; he finished his job and returned to the Navy well satisfied to accept his promotion and wait for the next job to turn up.

It happened to be the European war. He accepted it in the same ready spirit and crept about the North Sea in the blackness of night as he had worked over the glaring white Antarctic ice. He got his share of fighting in the first haphazard winter, and then, when the Swift and his own ship, the Broke, tumbled up against six German destroyers, his ability as a navigator told. He rammed a German ship, and, having used his brains, displayed his bravery by running alongside another and fighting her tooth and nail. He was later made Chief of Staff to the Admiral Of the Dover Patrol, given other staff jobs, lectured, and wrote a book, and set off a few weeks ago for a quiet port in the China Sea as one of our youngest captains. But the bright eyes of danger smile out at him again. No wonder the mild, bland Orientals were astonished at the direct and demon energy of the man who has made peril his bedfellow' because in the Arctic Ocean or the China, seas it was all in the way of duty. The seventeen ribbons on his breast will doubtless have to move up one now, and make room for yet another. —The “ Daily News.”