BLURB

Posted Missing
THE STORY OF SHIPS LOST WITHOUT TRACE IN RECENT YEARS

Illustrated with photographs, drawings and charts.

Every year, at least one big, well-found ship and a number of little ones of anything up to a thousand tons are Posted Missing at Lloyd's. The reasons for the loss of some of these are obvious, though no one actually witnessed their ends; some have simply disappeared from the face of the sea.
The ships posted missing whose cases Alan Villiers examines here range from the battleship Sao Paulo to little Breton fishing trawlers, from sailing-ships on the old Cape Horn route to oil-tankers during the Depression, from ships which vanished alone in fine weather to the groups which went missing at the same time — the nine Arctic trawlers in the January storm, and the five Norwegian sealers in the gale among the ice.
He has spared no pains to get all the facts : he has been to Norway and Newfoundland, Concarneau and Douarnenez, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Hamburg, Hull, Washington, D.C., and Copenhagen; he has attended Courts of Formal Investigation; he has studied transcripts of evidence, court records and other relevant documents; and he has drawn on his own knowledge, gathered over years of seafaring experience.
No one could be better qualified to tell the story of these ships and of the men who sailed in them.

CONTENTS

THE NINE LITTLE SHIPS

1 "Will Require One Fireman"
2 "The Usual Time in the Morning"
3 Father and Son
4 A Lifebuoy on the Beach

BATTLESHIP

5 The Battleship São Paulo

BLACK FROST

6 Mayday
7 Dodging to Death

THE FIVE SEALERS

8 Off Jan Mayen

PASSENGER SHIP

9 The Mystery of the Waratah
10 The Inquiry

SAILING-SHIP

11 Two School-ships

THE FISHERMEN OF BRITTANY

12 Six Little Ships: Seventy Men

TRAMPS

13 The Oil-tanker
14 Improperly Ballasted
15 Must the Crews also be Lost?

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. "In a heavy sea"
2. The Red Rock, only ship ever to come in after being Posted Missing at Lloyd's
3. The Lalla Rookh, once seriously overdue but never missing Plugging into a head sea
4. Trawler sinking off Greenland
5. Open hatch of a small Dutchman
6. The Dutch coaster
7. The lost battleship São Paulo
8. Arctic trawlers in Hull fish dock
9. Skipper George Coverdale
10. Hull trawlers are stout ships
11. Norwegian sealers have round hulls to lessen the danger of being crushed in the ice
12. The lost liner Waratah
13. South Sea traders alongside at Papeete, Tahiti
14. The Admiral Karpfanger
15. The Kobenhavn A sturdy little diesel trawler
16. The Vardulia
17. The General San Martin
18. Big, well-equipped lifeboat, but is it really adequate ?
19. Dories instead of lifeboats have done well. Here dories are nested on the decks of a Portuguese Grand Banker
20. Portuguese dory fisherman of the Joao Costa type
21. A dory on the Banks