Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Read Online Free Page B

don’t suppose there’s any way to teach coxswains like Trevelyan Richards how to do what they do in the teeth of hurricanes. It must come only from years spent learning the lessons of the sea. He charged at his target with all the power the Solomon Browne could give him, judging the waves, the rise and fall of the coaster rearing many feet above them like a cliff of steel. As the helicopter pilot and winchman looked on, the lifeboat made one run after another in an attempt to get into a position from which they could take the crew to safety. Time and again they were driven off.
    At the subsequent inquiry, held at Penzance, a letter from pilot Lieutenant Commander Smith was read outloud: “Throughout the entire rescue the Penlee crew never appeared to hesitate,” he wrote. “After each time they were washed…or blown away from the Union Star , the Penlee crew immediately commenced another run-in. Their spirit and dedication was amazing. They were truly the greatest eight men I have ever seen.”
    Trevelyan Richards’s calm, matter-of-fact voice came over the radio again.
    “We’re going to make an attempt to come alongside,” he said.
    “OK, skip,” said Morton. “Yup.”
    It’s all so free of drama. The two men talked to one another without a hint of panic or of fear, their quiet words more humbling than any battlefield command.
    A local news reporter was braving the hurricane up on the cliffs at Boscawen Cove. Through the blinding rain and wind he could just make out the outline of the coaster and, dwarfed beside her, the Solomon Browne. As the waves and gale pushed them toward the coastline, the two vessels were bow to bow: David and Goliath. A wave picked up the lifeboat and tossed it on to the Union Star like driftwood. She slithered and screamed across the green of the larger ship’s deck, crumpling steel guardrails like pipe cleaners before rolling off, stern first, into the roiling sea once more. According to the reporter and the helicopter pilot, this happened not once but twice. The Solomon Browne weighed 22 tons, but to a sea driven by a hurricane she was as inconsequential as a cloud of foam. Thanks to watertight compartments fore and aft, she was self-righting and bobbed like a cork in most conditions—but pitted against Cornish rocks and mountainous seas, she was as fragile as an egg.
    For a few moments the lifeboat stayed in place alongside the much larger vessel, held there as if by providence or collective will. As the reporter and the helicopter crew looked on, a handful of shadows leapt from the deck of the Union Star , out into the smothering, whirling blackness and down into the outflung arms of the lifeboatmen waiting so very far below.
    “Penlee lifeboat calling Falmouth Coastguard,” said Trevelyan Richards, calm as ever. “We’ve got four off, male and female.”
    It was Dawn Morton, her two daughters and one of the coaster’s crewmen. Of course, that could never have been enough for the coxswain and the crew of the Solomon Browne. Now the lives aboard both vessels were mixing together and becoming one, all 16 of them woven together.
    Trevelyan Richards took his boat back alongside the coaster once again. He was after every last man and his crew expected no less. The reporter watched, and the crew of the helicopter too. Falmouth Coastguard could only listen to their radio. What came next was everlasting silence.
    “Penlee lifeboat,” called the coastguard. “Penlee lifeboat. Falmouth Coastguard. Over.”
    Nothing.
    The coastguard repeated his call over and over, not believing.
    No one knows for sure what had happened; the full facts of that night, the minute-by-minute details of 16 lives fought for, were lost along with so much else. What does seem certain is that the two vessels came together in the dark one last time. Falmouth went on calling out to them.
    It’s thought that perhaps they’d been driven too close to shore and that finally a trough between waves exposed the