HEROES: Captain Stay Put

A dense fog hung low as the Isbrandtsen Company's 6,711-ton freighter Flying Enterprise moved away from her pier in Hamburg; her Danish-born master, Henrik Kurt Carlsen, 37, was obliged to conn her down the harbor by radar. There was nasty weather outside, and she creaked and complained as she rolled down past Dover and through the English Channel, heavy with a cargo of coffee beans, antique furniture, automobiles, U.S. mail and Rotterdam pig iron.

But until the seventh day of her New York-bound voyage, nothing suggested that she faced anything more than a routine crossing of the wintry Atlantic. Then, west and north of the Bay of Biscay, the ship was enveloped by an awesome storm. A black sky pressed down. The horizon vanished in flying spindrift. As solid seas began thundering over the vessel's bow, lier radio picked up a warning: worse was to come—the fiercest December gales in 22 years were howling along the European coast.

The Hull Cracks. On the bridge, the captain calmly prepared for trouble. During nearly 23 years as a deep-water sailor, amiable, stubborn Kurt Carlsen had been in his share of tight spots, but he bore small resemblance to the dramatic sea dog of fiction. He had, for instance, a penchant for providing flowers for the ship's passengers. He enjoyed toiling on deck with the crew. He kept a motorcycle on the ship, and used it for jaunts ashore—expeditions for which he often donned an electrically lighted bow tie. He was an unabashed radio ham and on dull nights at sea he liked to spell the ship's operator.

But for all this he was a fine seaman and a cool and capable officer. Some of his crew could remember how he had reacted four years ago when one of his "black gang" was found on the deck spouting blood from knife wounds in the throat and arms. There was no anesthetic on board, but the sweating Carlsen stitched the fainting victim's throat, sewed up two arteries, sprinkled the wounds with sulfa powder, and saved his life. Carlsen then grabbed the would-be murderer, got a confession, and went back to the bridge as if nothing had happened.

He was: as businesslike in the face of the storm. Wind and seas rose, hour by hour; by nightfall the vessel was pitching & rolling with sickening violence: Furniture slid and tumbled, tools leaped clattering from their hooks, dishes broke, and over the bedlam the wind yowled and screamed. At dawn two unbelievable waves (sailors swore they were 75 ft. high) fell on the Flying Enterprise. With a cannonlike bang, her shuddering deck and hull cracked open, just forward of her squat, white superstructure.

She reeled drunkenly on. But at 10:45 in the morning, with No. 3 hold filling, she rolled too far, and hung, half on her side, unable to right herself. Below, her ovenlike engine room became a madhouse.

Oil from overhead gravity tanks poured down in slippery streams on the tilted deck plates. Steam began to fail. The whine of the turbines diminished. Despite the struggles of the exhausted engineers, the generator failed, and with it power for lights and the laboring pumps.