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THE PAN-OCEANIC FAITH The night the Pan-Oceanic Faith went down in a storm in the North Pacific, we were a hundred miles south of her, another freighter plowing through stormy seas. As it turned out, she was a sister ship—SIU, like us. Two of our crew had boarded her in Seattle, months earlier. But something about her spooked them, and before she sailed they signed off. The sea that night was wild—with waves breaking over our bow. I had just been relieved at the wheel when Sparks stepped into the wheelhouse to report to the mate that he’d picked up an SOS . . . When Conrad wrote, “The sea came at us like a madman with an axe,” he had it right. Ten thousand tons of welded steel plate—buckled and smashed, by water. Three survivors, out of a crew of forty-two— a messman, the chief engineer, and one AB . . . “Why those three?” we wondered all the rest of the way in to Newport, Oregon, and looked around uneasily, weighing our chances, sizing each other up.
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