Simple Courage The Story of S.s. Flying Enterprise-and One of the Greatest Naval Rescues in History

1. In the national archives of the united states in washington, D.C., lies a dense reportseveral inches high of typed papers on top of which rests a separate, summarizing document ten pages long. This is "the record of the Marine Board convened to investigate subject casualty, together with its Findings of Fact, Opinions and Recommendations." Dated February 26, 1952, and signed by "P. A. Ovenden, Chief of the Merchant Vessel Inspection Division in the United States Coast Guard," this official prose contains no hint of the magic energy that conceives a legend. Mr. Ovenden's conclusions, sent by the Coast Guard to the chief of Merchant Marine Safety, begin by observing that a welded freighter named S.S. Flying Enterprise "departed from Hamburg, Germany for New York on 21 December 1951, loaded, among other things, with 762.6 tons of pig iron in No. 2 lower hold and 508 tons of pig iron in No. 4 hold." Flying Enterprise, a freighter in the class known as "C1-B," was built in the Wilmington yards at Los Angeles by the Consolidated Steel Corporation and released from the shipbuilder's yard to the War Shipping Administration on March 18, 1944. (The man who stamped her brass registration plate made an error in the date, and his original "1943" is overstamped with "1944.") She had the registration number 245133 and the combined signal and radio call sign KWFZ. After the war she went, in January 1946, to the U.S. Maritime Administration, where she was named Cape Kumukaki. On April 25, 1947, Cape Kumukaki became one of twelve vessels in the Isbrandtsen Line, out of New York, owned by a buccaneering Scandinavian, Hans Isbrandtsen, who, to echo the old sailing clippers, used the prefix Flying for all his cargo ships. He had accumulated his fleet largely by purchasing, at bargain prices from the U.S. Navy, those ships no longer required for the transport of wartime supplies. For this, his competitors in the bare-knuckle freight shipping business disliked himlargely because he had stolen a march on them. His son, Jakob Isbrandtsen, thinks today that Flying Enterprise "must have been one of the last of the C1-B class. They weren't great freighters; they were too small and too slow." Yet they were not, in a landsman's terms, insignificant ships. Here are Flying Enterprise's vital statistics, which become crucial to her poignant history. She had three decks and two masts; her length, stem to stern, was 396 feet, her breadth 60 feet, her depth just short of 26 feet; she had 4,000 horsepower, weighed 6,711 tons, had a range of 15,000 miles without refueling, and had a cruising speed of 14 knots (equivalent on land to 16 miles per hour, a knot equaling 2,027 yards per hour). You will not find anywhere in her papers the astounding fact that S.S. Flying Enterprise once became the most famous ship in the worlda renown that lingers, especially among career sailors. And among men who, inside themselves, can still be boys: for us, this cargo ship, longer than a football field and painted jet-black, became and remained part of our inner lives. In the typeface named Cheltenham, the white name isbrandtsen stood ten feet high along her sides, with flying enterprise inscribed smaller on her bows; for two weeks these thrilling words dominated the conversation of the planet. She was that most romantic of sea creatures, a tramp steamer, and after departing New York on November 24, she called to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Norfolk, Virginia. Now, almost ready for the homebound leg of her twenty-seventh voyage, she sat patiently, being loaded in Hamburg on the shortest day of the year. i was nine years oldDelaney, Frank is the author of 'Simple Courage The Story of S.s. Flying Enterprise-and One of the Greatest Naval Rescues in History', published 2007 under ISBN 9780812975956 and ISBN 0812975952.