TOUGH AMERICAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 September 1942, Page 4

TOUGH AMERICAN

PICKED UP IN ICY WATERS OFF GREENLAND SOON NONE THE WORSE. BUT CONCERNED ABOUT WOODEN LEG. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, Noon.) RUGBY, September 13. The American merchant seaman is every bit as tough as his British brother, to judge by the experience ox his Majesty’s corvette Honeysuckle. At midnight, off the winter coast of Greenland, lookouts in. the corvette sighted a lone figure clinging to a raft. A boat was lowered to pick him up. When he had been taken aboard it was found that he was an elderly man. A sailor, finding one of his legs rigid and hard, said: “Blimey, he’s frozen stiff.” . , “That’s all right, son,” said the survivor, the sixty-five-year-old master of an American merchant ship, “it’s only my wooden leg. This is the third time I’ve had to swim for it, but it's never hurt me yet.” When he got on deck, the first thing the rescued skipper did was to unscrew his wooden leg and give it to a sailor to be dried out in the engineroom. “But be careful,” he said, “there’s 500 dollars in it.”

Although he had been for four hours in icy waters, within a few hours of his coming aboard he was none the worse for his experience.