Sailing, sailing over the bounding seas

The romance of the sea, ah, even sitting on a large boulder all alone at the edge of remote Dog Pond in Goshen my thoughts often wandered to the days I had sailed the bounding seas, first aboard Norway’s Christian Radich and then the USGC Eagle. Both were student training tall ships.Was it really romantic? On our first Saturday night after we had hoisted the sails in Bermuda’s Hamilton Harbor, I sat on an orange crate on the Radich — this was not a cruise ship — with a reporter from the Associated Press, on his crate.The cadets, except a few on watch, were in their bunks. The officers were where they belonged, in the officer’s quarters.We had brought a bottle of Scotch on board as a gift to what we had heard were hard-drinking Norwegians. “No alcohol on this ship,” the XO told us. The surprised AP man turned to me: “I haven’t spent a sober Saturday night since I left college,” he whispered. So, Saturday night we uncorked the bottle and, between telling lies, passed the bottle back and forth between us on the empty deck.There was enough breeze for the ship to heel over about 30 degrees or so. The sails were bulging tight as they pulled the ship through the water. Looking up, the sky, empty of clouds, presented a dazzling panoply of endless universes.We could have been sailing with Magellan and the other early great explorers, or conspiring with Fletcher Christian to seize the Bounty from Captain Bligh.u u uWhat I never thought of was hitting an iceberg and plunging into the icy waters off of Newfoundland with more than a 1,000 other hapless souls aboard the ill-fated Titanic.But this year, the Titanic and the best movie filmed about the disaster have captured the imagination of the American and British publics. Again, after a 100 years.In a story that has been told many times (one of my first books when I was a teenager was about the sinking of the unsinkable and largest ship to ride the waves) new facts continue to emerge.One of lesser importance describes the dinner menu on the night of the unholy crash. It had been hidden for a number of years in the pocket book of one of the survivors. Dinner in the first dining salon featured 10 courses, from oysters, to cream of barley, to poached salmon, filet mignon, sauté of chicken, roast squab, on to lamb, roast duckling, sirloin of beef, to a variety of vegetables, pate de foie gras, ending with the three choices of dessert in the final course, Waldorf pudding, peaches in Chartreuse jelly, chocolate and vanilla éclairs and French ice cream.Then there is the kosher kitchen! “I didn’t know that there were any Jews on the Titanic” was a remark recorded in a recent newspaper account. No Jews on the Titanic! One of the iconic stories of the last hours of the great ship is a powerful tale of sacrifice: Ida Straus, wife of Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s, refused to get into a lifeboat when sailors were refusing to seat men. She declared she had lived with her husband for all these years of a happy marriage and would stay with him to the end. They went to their watery grave together. There are numerous memorials in Europe to this unique woman.Did they dine on kosher delicacies? Potato Pancakes a la Belfast? We will never know. The Strauses occupied one of the most expensive suites on the great ocean liner and we have no copy of the kosher kitchen’s menu that night. Nor I have seen a copy of the spartan dinner served the thousand immigrants in third class who were seeking a new life in America. And who suffered the most casualties.u u uWhile there were more than a thousand passengers lost when the ship slipped into the ocean, more lives were lost at sea during the last days of World War II than on the Titanic.In the book “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945,” author Max Hastings relates how the Soviets stopped the Nazi blitzkrieg 20 miles from Moscow and pushed the Germans back into their own homeland. There’s in the book an extraordinary story of the exploits of a Soviet submarine commander. He just happened to be sailing in the North Sea when he came upon a passenger ship loaded with 5,000 transplanted German civilians trying to return to their homeland by sea. The Russian captain let loose his torpedoes and sank the vessel in moments, drowning most of the hapless Germans. He proceeded along the shore, came upon another port with another 5,000 Germans hastily boarding another old passenger ship. Torpedoes sent that ship sinking into the waters, carrying its cargo of humans to their deaths as well.The exploits of this captain were kept quiet for many years because the captain had lacked credibility and the KGB didn’t believe his story. He persisted in trying to tell it and so enraged the KGB that he was sent to prison for seven or eight years. When his story was corroborated and he was released, he was given a sort of hero’s welcome upon his return home.That’s only a smidge of my stories of sailing the bounding waves. There was the time the troopship I was on broke down in the middle of the Atlantic ... but that’s for another time.Freelance writer Barnett Laschever, formerly of Goshen, taps away on his iMac in a nice cottage in a Simsbury retirement village.