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Show fmm :,h .i k : , ;feS- m:m-m.. k - ---- oMii vf s - I ,t 1 i. p;t-V ' . j,, 7 ' N the dusty records of the M great maritime world's movements the brief entry en-try of the missing yawl l5 Pandora will read like Itsfgjs "Pandora; yawl. Perth, ItjUj Australia. Captains Blythe JJJ an Arapakis. From New York for London, July 20, 1911. Not reported." Maritime Miscel. The words give no intimation of the mystery, or perhaps tragedy, which lies behind them. ' Only to some bronzed skipper who knows the North Atlantic in all her moods will their meaning be clear. Those two words are all the world has time to give to the fight, of two brave men against the unconquered : strength of the sea, against starva-1 starva-1 tion and thirst, against the winds and the storms and ice and unbear-. unbear-. able heat. In some cases "not reported" re-ported" tells merely the story of a schooner lost through carelessness, but in the case of the little Pandora and her brave skippers a volume might be written of their adventures. Theirs is the story of the call of the sea, the song to which their ears had been trained for generations and to which they listened once too often. Three years have passed since they : heard it the last time, and more than a year ago the Pandora left New York harbor for London after her thrilling voyage from Australia. She has never been seen since she dropped past the pilot's boat. No vessel passing In or out of New York or any other North Atlantic port has ; ever sighted the sturdy little yawl. Now Bhe has become a part of that mysterious fleet of which the Flying Dutchman Is the flagship and which ; has the Sargasso sea as its place of gathering. The story of Capt. Samuel Blythe and Capt. Peter Axapakis is one of two men who saw more than the spray in a breaking wave. To them the sea but meant life and liberty, freedom of action and thought, and for years they made it play Its part. Then the waves rose and demanded their due, and the Pandora, with her skippers, was the toll. The Pandora was 36 feet long and of generous beam for her length. Her keel was stocky and dwarfed and her mainmast the size of a derrick boom. Her sails she had three sets were of the best grade of heavy naval can-! can-! vas, and as for Interior fittings, she had none other than demanded by ab-: ab-: solute necessity. The Pandora was : not for pleasure save In an Inverted ' sense. She was to sail around the ; world, but her owners also intended i to make certain nautical observation? which they hoped would be of value ; to the world. f So, one fine day three years ago . Bhe sailed out of Perth harbor, provisioned for a four months' cruise and with two men on board who had answered to the call of the sea. The Pandora was bound for Cape Horn, but she was to call at several South American ports for fresh supplies. The voyage across the Pacific was uneventful, un-eventful, fair winds and a calm sea was prevailing all the way. Along the Chilian coast they' put Into two harbors har-bors for food and water and as each day passed their admiration for the little lit-tle Pandora grew, for she was proving prov-ing worthy with every new emergency. emer-gency. So far the sea had permitted the indignity of two men In a thirty-six foot boat and had left them unmolested, unmo-lested, but Just after they set out to round the Horn it rose in majestic indignation in-dignation and began to refute their theories. i If It were not for the unmistakable signs which such a-n experience would have left on the yawl the tale of Captain Cap-tain Arapakis could hardly have been believed. But the dents which the compass box had made on the cabin roof and the scar on Captain Arapakis' Arapa-kis' head were enough proof without the photographs of the Pandora after the storm. ' The Pandora ran into bad weather two days after she started around the Horn and before she had passed the entrance to the Straits of Magellan. There was a wind of about sixty miles velocity and it had, during the course of an afternoon blown up waves from sixty to seventy feet in height. Toward evening the wind suddenly veered completely around, with the result that the top of each wave was blown back and folded over, much afte the manner in which a cook would treat a piece of dough out of which he Intended to make a Parker House roll. The little Pandora was trying to live out the storm under a try-sail and sea anchof and was succeeding in her usual manner, man-ner, much to the gratification of her designers and builders, when the sail was carried away by a gust and the kedge anchor went by the board. It was the third they had lost during the afternoon. , As soon as the restraint of the sea anchor was lifted the Pandora swung into the trough of one great wave. Up and up she climbed on the wall of water until it grew thin and weak at the top and was folded back by the wind. The wave broke just above the yawl and crashed back, carrying the little vessel with it. Then the Pandora turned completely complete-ly over and for a space of twenty seconds sec-onds everything in her cabin, including includ-ing her skippers, rested on the roof. B,y the law of precedent she should have sunk like a cannon ball, but the Pandora was not built along those lines. She righted herself and lived, but her main mast had been snapped short and all of her rigging, with the exception of the Jury mast, was acting as a flail as It followed along in the trough. It was half an hour of hard work before the foul rigging was cut away. All night the Pandora tossed in the storm, but she came through on top and was worked into port under un-der ier Jury sail. So great had been the force of the storm that long strips of the copper sheeting which covered her hull had been torn away. Perhaps this fact accounts for her later loss. With a new mast and another set of sails the Pandora made her way to New York and she reached Quarantine Quaran-tine more than two years after she left Perth. She looked like some sort of a dejected mongrel when I went on board her as she lay at the Atlantic Yacht Club anchorage, but her captains cap-tains were proud and spent several hours telling of their little yawl's performances per-formances under the most trying ponditions. Captain Arapakis was of Greek descent, de-scent, b'-it how far back it was 'he could lut tell. Ha was not an unimaginative un-imaginative sailor, lor his talks about his life and his bout were full of philosophies phil-osophies that come only to a man who has spent solitary months at sea. The little cabin of the Pandora contained a number of books, such as one would hardly expect to see in such a place. There were Darwia, Spencer, two volumes of Balzac, the sea tales of Kipling and Kingsley. Captain Blythe was more the usual type of stolid British merchant skipper skip-per who always talked with one eye cocked to the weather and his other resting with a pleased expreslon on some pet line of the Pandora. While the Pandora was in New York one of the Greek societies gave to each of the men a medal. Two weeks in New York was enough for them. They had hoped to take the Pandora out of water and repair the torn copper hull sheathing, but the weather was so fine and the winds so even that they decided to get under way for London. On July 20, 1911, they hoisted Bail and started. That Is as far as the story goes. Three months later Captain Blythe's brother, J. Forbes Blythe, of Coventry, Coven-try, England, wrote a letter to the custom house in New York asking for information about the Pandora and saying the little vessel had never reported re-ported in any English or Continental port. No Information could be given to him. |