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Lost Ships

10K views 28 replies 17 participants last post by  Harry Nicholson 
#1 ·
About 1957/8 I was involved in radio traffic concerning two lost ships.
One was the "Nordic Star" which vanished as it was about to enter Biscay from the USA, she was a "London Greek" I think.
The other was an Indian ship the "Cowasjee Dinshaw" which was lost in a Cyclone in the Indian Ocean. I have never forgotten those ships, particularly the
Indian which I was in contact with as she neared her end.
I keep searching the web for information but nothing so far. Does anyone have knowledge of these losses?. Where would one locate the detail of any inquests into the disappearences?
regards
Harry Nicholson
 
#29 ·
Bab el Mandeb

I've spent a while looking for a place to post a poem - Finding nowhere I ended up here where I had posted a couple before.

This is not about a lost ship, but is about lost generations and lost times perhaps:

Passage Through Bab el Mandeb

(A memory of the Brocklebank steamer
SS Marwarri in 1960)

The steam turbine throbs down the Red
Sea road, through the oiled steel deck,
the rust-streaked hull, in the dreaded
dripping sweat of the Red Sea road.

You have never seen such colour,
it’s a molten sea of brass, splashed
across with mazarine, and Mocha
burns in orange low away to port.

The sky, blinding at the zenith,
fades into asses milk along the horizon,
across the ovens of Punt,
Eritrea and the Sudan.

Javelins in volleys -
flying fish pursued by nightmares -
break surface, trailing
necklaces of silver.

Then, like salamanders dancing
in a furnace, tortured islands
rise up twisted dead ahead -
shimmering anvils of the sun.

Vapours exude
out of long-dead mahogany.
Decades of varnish soften
and creep down bulkheads.

The banded funnel exhales
black smoke in rippled pulses
that hover, then drift away astern.
The phosphor-bronze screw thuds out

the passage of time. But
the crew are ghosts in history now,
scraps of memory, as the old ship glides
through the Gates of Weeping.

Begun 2003, revised Oct 2010 for the Brocklebank Reunion.

Harry Nicholson, one-time chief radio officer, SS Marwarri.

(Bab el Mandeb translates: “Gates of Weeping” – these are the straits at the southern end of the Red Sea across which slaves were carried out of Africa to the markets of Arabia)
 
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