AT SEA: Mouse Free

Like a scared mouse scuttling along a kitchen wall, the celebrated little U. S. freighter City of Flint hugged the rough Norwegian coast last week as it crept down from Tromsö. The Government of Norway, not the least like a skittish housewife in its presence, detailed the mine layer Olaf Tryggvason and a torpedo boat to watch her. Off a fiord north of Bergen, the German prize crew requested that because of a sick man aboard, it should be allowed to put in at Haugesund, 60 miles south of Bergen and last port before the jump-off into British-patrolled waters. A doctor from Olaf Tryggvason went aboard, but all he could find by way of sickness was a man who had barked his shin on a barrel. Russia had let City of Flint enter Murmansk on the unverified claim of engine trouble; cocky little Norway, having found no basis for the second claim to asylum, refused the request.

But when City of Flint reached Haugesund, it dropped anchor anyhow. Norwegian officials went aboard and asked why the Germans had disobeyed their decision. “Orders from my Government,” said the prize chief. Norway at once interned the prize crew, released City of Flint to her captain to go wherever he had a mind (see p. 16). He headed for neutral Bergen to wait for the political nor’easter to wane. Germany, in a great show of fury, protested to Norway. Norway coolly rejected the protest, with a review of the case which made it look very much as though Germany, wanting neither to risk the North Sea crossing nor to lose face by giving the ship back to its U. S. crew, had deliberately sought internment.

>Meantime another freighter, the British Coulmore, became another ship-of-the-week. During heavy weather at night, 500 miles east of Nantucket, she radioed she had been attacked by a submarine, wanted rescuing. To the spot rushed U. S. Coast Guard cutters and destroyers and the U. S. press got excited because Coulmore’s message placed her near the zone where the Panama Conference and President Roosevelt had forbidden belligerents to operate.

The rescuers found nothing. Captain W. W. Kuhne of American Export Line’s Excambion docked at Boston and snorted: “The whole thing sounds fishy! . . . Very heavy seas were running. It was pitch-dark. Visibility was almost zero. In my opinion no submarine could have operated successfully.”

Presently American Trader radioed that Coulmore was perfectly safe, but did not explain the scare. Germany called it a scurvy British trick.

>Into the Panama Canal Zone went the British cruiser Despatch with news that somewhere in the Caribbean last month she had overhauled the German tanker Emmy Friederich, carrying 40,000 barrels of Mexican oil and quantities of provisions, ostensibly bound for Sweden but more likely for a sea-raider rendezvous (TIME, Oct. 30). When Despatch’s men boarded her, Emmy’s men opened her seacocks, scuttled the prize. Despatch passed through the Canal into the Pacific, perhaps to chase the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, which was believed to have rounded the Horn. Two German freighters which had taken refuge in Nagasaki, Japan since war’s outbreak last week hastily changed their cargoes of soybeans for fuel oil.

>A bad failure of the British convoy system was reported. After escorting 27 cargo ships out of Gibraltar until well on their way toward the British Isles, some British men-o’-war turned back. Within a few minutes up popped a small school of U-boats which had been trailing the convoy, sank five ships in rapid succession (three British, two French).

>From London came word of a hero of last month’s big Firth of Forth air raid: Commander Richard F. Jolly of the destroyer Mohawk. Shot through both legs by a machine-gun burst from one of the Nazi bombers, he called for a chair, directed the answering fire, conned his ship home to her base, fell dead as she docked.

>The first British prize court was held last week in London with Sir Boyd Merriman presiding. First cases: the German freighters Pomona and Hannah Böge, seized in a British port and on the high seas, respectively. Sir Boyd ruled in each case that they should “forthwith be released and delivered to the Crown . . . urgently needed for defense of the realm.” When a ship is seized in port, the proceeds go to the Exchequer; to the Admiralty if seized at sea. Custodian of all ships and goods confiscated by the Ministry of Economic Warfare (“Ministry of Starvation” is Germany’s name for it) until they are ruled on by the prize court is H. G. Cockell, £953-a-year clerk. Last week Admiralty Marshal Cockell had in hand millions of pounds of ships and shipments. The Allied blockade’s score for the war’s first eight weeks was 550,000 tons of contraband. Last week’s score for U-boats and mines: twelve ships, 52,600 tons.