THE INDIAN OCEAN: Men & the Sea

On a clear, moonlit night, the 9,786-ton Norwegian motorship Skaubryn plowed through the long swells of the Indian Ocean, six days south of Suez, bound for Australia with 1,088 passengers—mostly German and Maltese emigrants—and a crew of 200. At 8:45 p.m. trouble broke out in the engine room. A disconnected fuel line spurted a torrent of oil £. onto red-hot exhaust pipes. Within seconds, the engine room was a coiling mass of flames. The engine-room crew were driven out before they could even shut off the spurting oil.

As fire sirens wailed and choking smoke poured through the ship, a few men passengers panicked and rushed into the lifeboats ahead of sobbing women and screaming children. When they ignored orders to get out, they were knocked unconscious by crew members and dragged back on deck. But after that, the ship was. abandoned in perfect order. In 35 minutes the Skaubryn was roaring from end to end like an acetylene torch, but every passenger and seaman was in the safety of lifeboats on the calm sea. As long as they were able, the two radio operators sent out SOS signals. The ship's master, Captain Alf Faeste, was the last man off, sliding down a rope with the log book. There was only one casualty: a German businessman died in his lifeboat of a heart attack.

Within half an hour the lights of a rescue ship, the British freighter City of Sydney, bore down on the survivors. Children were lifted aboard in cargo baskets, men and women scrambled up rope ladders. A German emigrant from West Berlin said fervently: "The Indian crew and the English officers of the City of Sydney behaved wonderfully to us. One of the Indians put as many as eight children in his bed and brought them refreshments." Next day the Skaubryn's passengers and crew, men and women from 20 nations, were transferred from the overcrowded freighter to the Italian liner Roma, bound for Europe. Few of Roma's waiters, stewards, cooks and deckhands got more than four hours' sleep in the three days they cared for the survivors before putting them ashore at Aden, where volunteer relief committees had prepared a newly finished hospital and a girls' school to shelter them.

In the long roll of wrack at sea, the burning of the Skaubryn will be remembered as a disaster where men triumphed, and not the elements. The master of City of Sydney sent a radio message of farewell to Skaubryn's Captain Alf Faeste and his crew: "Your feat in lowering 16 boats containing 1,300 people into the water in 35 minutes without loss of life or injury, with so little warning, and from a blazing ship, is a superb example of seamanship and discipline unique in maritime history. When you speak of this disaster, you can hold your heads high, all of you."