LEBANON Wreck of the Champollion
The 12,546-ton French liner Champollion plowed through the squally eastern Mediterranean one day last week on course for Beirut, capital of Lebanon. Aboard were 111 passengers, most of them Christmas pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, and 212 crewmen skippered by Captain Henri Bourde, a taciturn French salt who knows the Levantine seas like the back of his gnarly hand.
As dawn flushed the snow on the mountains of Lebanon, one of the passengers, Robert Bagarry, went on deck to watch the lights of his home town, Beirut, twinkling on the starboard bow. "We were heading north," he said afterwards. "Then suddenly we turned east ... directly towards the land. I felt like yelling to the bridge to tell them they were wrong, but I said to myself, 'They know better than I do.' "
As events turned, they didn't. There was a gentle scraping sound; then a violent thud and the Champollion was firmly aground, four miles south of Beirut.
SOS. Where was the captain? No one knew. No alarm was given, no ship's officer appeared on the bridge to give the order to abandon ship or to stand fast. The purser told the passengers that the Champollion was aground off Israel, and that the city ahead was Haifa. "Everything is fine," he added cheerily.
Beirut didn't think so. An S 0 S from the Champollion brought a multitude of bare-chested fisherfolk racing to the rescue. But their cockleshell boats capsized in the raging surf, and those who tried to swim out with lines were dragged ashore half-drowned.
Six to a Blanket. All day long and long into the night the rescuers fought the waves. White-crested combers tore a gaping hole in the ship's iron side and a yawning fissure opened midships (see NEWS IN PICTURES). Crew and passengers huddled, six to a blanket, on the sharply listing foredeck where Pere Lechat, the priest in charge of the French pilgrims, gave absolution to everyone aboard.
After 24 hours of pounding, the ship's quartermaster ordered all who could to swim for their lives. Fifty brave souls obeyed, among them Langdon Harris, 32, the only American aboard. As each bobbing head drew clear of the oil-covered maelstrom, Lebanese fishers plunged into the rollers and towed the survivors to shore. Langdon Harris and a ten-year-old French boy whom he held in his arms were among the 35 to reach the shore alive; 17 were drowned or smashed to pulp on the rocks.
Hero of the Hour. As Beirut buzzed with the news that the stricken Champollion was about to break up, 25,000 curious townspeople streamed out to the sand dunes. Lebanese troops cleared a way to the water's edge and set up box seats for Beirut's dignitaries; Coke and peanut vendors did a roaring trade.
It was the seamanship of Lebanon's fisherfolk that staved off further disaster. Hero of the hour was Radwan Baltaji, the leathery little chief of Beirut's harbor pilots. On the second day, Radwan, in his jaunty red tarboosh, breached the raging surf in his tiny pilot boat and maneuvered into the shelter of the British cruiser Kenya, which had raced to the rescue from Suez. Using the cruiser's steel bulk as a floating breakwater, Radwan swerved broadside to the waves and slid into the quiet water in the lee of the wreck. Sixty-three women & children climbed down to safety.