Читать книгу The Scarlet Stripe--being the adventures of a naval surgeon - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 3

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THE persons and ships mentioned in this book exist only in my imagination. Nevertheless, it is not entirely fiction. The main incidents of the sinking of a ‘Q Ship’ by an enemy submarine, and the subsequent boat journey of 150 miles to the Irish coast by some of the survivors, are true. The Surgeon Probationer, R.N.V.R., or Surgeon Sub-lieutenant, as he would be called nowadays, was in charge of the boat with the number of men mentioned in my story, and served with me in destroyers both before and after the incident. His own and his shipmates’ obituaries did appear in the official casualty list, and were cancelled two days later.

Moreover, frequent piracies of coasting steamers in the China Seas have occurred on the lines of that described in subsequent chapters. Truth is stranger than fiction, and I would refer incredulous readers to the seizure of s.s. Sunning, on November 15, 1926, and of the Haiching on December 8, 1929—two instances among many.

On October 22, 1926, the sloop Valerian sank with heavy loss of life during a hurricane off Bermuda. I have taken the liberty of shifting the scene of the disaster through some 170 degrees of longitude. Typhoons in the China Sea and hurricanes in the Western Atlantic have much in common.

TAFFRAIL.

1932.