THE HIGH SEAS: End of a Windjammer

A funereal hush fell over West Germany’s air waves one day last week. Broadcasting stations all over the land canceled all light entertainment to stand by for news of a great ship in distress far out in the stormy Atlantic. As hundreds of Germans flocked to their churches to pray, some ten vessels of half a dozen nations fanned out into the stormy sea, and a dozen aircraft joined the search. It was no ordinary ship, buttressed with armor plate, throbbing with power and bristling with the safety devices of a modern age, that faced the furies of Hurricane Carrie some 500 miles southwest of the Azores, but a tall and graceful relic of an older and braver day: the 3,103-ton, four-masted bark Pamir.

One by One. Before World War II, the proudest moment in the declining years of the great, square-rigged cargo carriers was the annual “grain race” from Australia to England. Some 20 windjammers hauled anchor down under at the start of that race in 1932, but by 1949 only two were left to make the run: the Pamir and her sister ship, the Passat. One by one, the others had fallen foul of wind and wave and the economic pressures of their own huffing and puffing competitors. But even though the world of commerce chose to bypass the windjammers, there were many, particularly among the hornyhanded sailormen of northern Europe, who cherished the brave tradition they represented, and insisted that only sail could train a sailor.

Last year some 40 West German steamship companies got together to underwrite the costs of operating the veteran windjammers Passat and Pamir as training ships for future officers. So many youths crowded the offices to apply for berths that four out of five were turned away.

Two Hours. The steel-hulled Pamir set sail from Hamburg last June for Falmouth, England, and Buenos Aires, with a complement of 53 cadets and 33 veteran seamen aboard. Last week, homeward bound from B.A., she was struck by the full (127-knot) force of Carrie, which the skipper had not expected to hit for a full two hours. Even as Captain Johannes Diebitsch barked his orders to douse sail, the blocks jammed on the foremast, broaching the bark broadside to the wind. In the nightmare of ripping canvas and splintering timber, much of the vessel’s cumbersome top hamper came crashing down, covering the deck with a lethal spiderweb of flailing steel cables. Heavy wooden yardarms slashed right and left, battering lifeboats and rafts into pulp, and punching holes in the deck itself.

As the angry sea poured into the holds to make an expanding porridge of the barley stowed below, those of the Pamir’s crew who had escaped the fury of the pounding wreckage clung desperately to nets on the heaved-up windward side of the already sinking ship. When the Pamir went down, just two hours after the storm struck, many of the crew were already dead; some, swimming or clinging to debris in the water, were sucked down as the vessel sank; exhausted, others gave up soon afterward.

Some 25 managed to board the one lifeboat that was left intact; ten more climbed into a damaged one. Several times during the long night that followed, rescue vessels passed close by, unable to hear the survivors’ frantic calls for help, which were swallowed in the roars of the still raging sea and wind. In the damaged lifeboat, five men died of exhaustion and exposure during the next 54 hours. By the third morning the remaining five, living armpit-deep in water, were almost too weak to move. That afternoon, as if by magic, the great steel bow of the U.S. Isbrandtsen Co. freighter Saxon loomed almost directly over their heads, framed by a rainbow as a sudden rain squall cut into the sunlight. Minutes later, the five survivors, of whom the eldest was 24, were safe on board. A sixth, the only man left in the lifeboat that had once held 25, was picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Absecon. No sign was found of the rest of the 86 Pamir crewmen.

Amid the stunned grief and angry outcry in Germany that greeted the news of the Pamir’s loss, there were many to complain of a needless sacrifice of the nation’s youth, but many more to defend the tradition they died by. There still were eager cadets aplenty to sign for the next voyage of the Passat.