World War: AT SEA: Junket

When World War II caught the German liner Orinoco at sea, she headed for the tropical port of Tampico. She has been laid up there ever since, while her officers and men took their ease in Tampico’s hotels, fished in the tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

One day last fortnight, following the example of the U.S., Mexican officials boarded twelve Axis ships in Vera Cruz and Tampico, took possession of them to forestall sabotage. On board the Orinoco they found navigation instruments missing, learned that six Nazi sailors had disappeared.

Questioned, the sailors’ grinning comrades told a fantastic story. In a soft. lifeboat, equipped with sails and an auxiliary motor, the missing men had stowed sextant and compass, fuel, a month’s supply of food and water. Night before the Orinoco was seized, they slipped away, sailed quietly out of Tampico harbor, headed east across the Gulf. Presumably they hoped to clear the Florida Keys, make their way through the British blockade across 4,000 miles of open sea to an Atlantic port on the Nazi-occupied coast of France—a cruise some 800 miles longer than Captain Bligh’s epic voyage with the loyal crew of the Bounty.