COLOURED HEROES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 November 1941, Page 6

COLOURED HEROES

SEA RESCUES BY MALAY & INEGRO. THEIR OWN LIVES LOST ON LATER VOYAGE. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, November 11. A British merchant captain has told how Malayan and Jamaican members of his crew saved the lives of 13 sailors who were struggling in the sea. “We were standing by another ship which had been torpedoed at 3 a.m., he said. “It had sent away a lifeboat under the chief officer with every man I could spare. I even put at the helm an engineroom greaser who had nevei handled the ship’s wheel in his life. “I was standing in the wing of the bridge staring through my nightglasses at the lights on the lifejackets of the men in the water and trying to make out what was going on. Suddenly my Malayan carpenter, Peteree,, who had been with me for eight years, came, up on the bridge. ‘May I take away the jollyboat?’ he asked. .“Then the cook Jeffreys—a Jamaican so black that coal would have made a white mark on him bawled up from the. bottom of the ladder, Sii, can I go too?’ I told them to go ahead. They launched the little jollyboat, and away they went. “There was 'quite a heavy sea running, but in half an hour the jollyboat was back with seven survivors whom the cook had pulled out of the water. Back they went again into the darkness, and this time they returned with six more men.” The story has not a happy ending. On the next voyage the ship was torpedoed and Carpenter Peteree and Cook Jeffreys lost their lives. The captain reached England after four days in a lifeboat.