Not to Be Forgotten
The Men Who Captained the Merchant Ships Are Among the Heroes of the War
By telling the story of Captain Frank M. Custance, of the Royal Navy Reserve, as typical of the stories of a coterie of merchant ship men in the service, Mr. Ralph E. Cropley most interestingly reminds the public that the war was not altogether won by the men in the trenches. The merchant ship commanders played some small part in the winning. Indeed, Mr. Cropley goes somewhat further. He concludes his story of Captain Custance, which appeared in the New York Evening Post, with this paragraph:
“Without their valor this war would have been over long ago and Germany would have won. I say this without reserve, for it is the truth. It has only been by their untiring sacrifices that the soldiers have gotten to the trenches at all and been kept supplied with munitions and food. The merchant ship men have done work which gold cannot pay for and never have thought of themselves—simply of the great cause which to them has meant the end of cruelty.”
Though Captain Custance is an English seaman he is familiarly known to Americans who have sailed between New York and Bermuda in the winter or to the Land of the Midnight Sun in summer, for he was Captain of the tourist boat Arcadian that made those trips in the different seasons. He was up among the Norwegian fords when England entered the war, and it was a question whether he could save his ship by evading the Germans. Not that he personally had any question about it. He proceeded to act with the calm assurance characteristic of his conduct in normal sailings, quietly determined to get safely away. So, excellent seaman that he was, “in the darkness of that famous Monday night of Aug. 4, 1914, without a pilot, he took her through the dangerous ford to sea. ’Twas indeed a feat.”
But there were dangers at sea, too, for it was necessary to avoid any ship or craft that heaved in sight, and constant vigilance, with much dodging, was necessary before he got into Liverpool with his American passengers saved from anything so unpleasant and perilous as drifting in open boats on the high seas. With equal success he landed them in New York some days later, their number having been added to by Americans stranded in England.