And that was why she sailed uninsured, for Lloyd’s--that gamest of all maritime-insurance companies, in whose rooms a gamble will be taken even upon a ship whose skipper "cracks on sail into the Day of Judgment"--had refused her as a risk. She had been denied British clearance, too, and her only papers were a board-of-health certificate, countersigned by the American consul in her port of departure. Before her company was filled, a score of captains had thrown up their sea-calloused hands in holy horror when offered the master’s billet aboard her, and two crews had deserted before her forefoot could bruise the ocean swells. And even now the old craft is short-manned. The date first set for the sailing of the _Success_ from the port on the River Lune saw the _Titanic_ clear Southampton upon her memorable and tragic maiden voyage. The old barkentine, however, was delayed by an inability to fill her crew. "If I hadn’t known the sort of stuff that the old girl was built of, I’d have been as skeptical of her chances as the rest," Captain D. H. Smith, her owner, admits. "As vessels go nowadays, she isn’t any giant. She is only one hundred and thirty-five feet over all, with a beam of twenty-nine feet, and registered at five hundred and eighty-nine tons. And then consider her age and history. "She was built of teak throughout--what they used to call ‘black ship’--and that’s why I have such faith in her, even though she was battered up some in her early youth by the Indian Ocean pirates, and after she fell from caste was moored for so many years as a prison hulk. "But she made the thousands of miles between Australia and England under her own sail, and then I determined to bring her to the United States." The _Success_, all sail set to catch the last of the easterly winds she had counted on to carry her across the north Atlantic in forty-six days, left Lancaster with fair weather. She was provisioned for fifty days and carried eighteen thousand gallons of water. Cordage humming, she stood bravely on the out course, and when she was ten hours beyond sight of land, her wireless operator, Gallagher, sat at a little petrol outfit which had been installed aboard her, sending the last good-bys of the little ship’s company of nineteen over the evening sea. Crook Haven, the great Irish station, was taking his messages, the _Success_, with her call of "I. D. B.," having been given right of way over all other craft. Time and time again other ships tried to cut in, but Crook Haven "turned them out" until Gallagher finished. Then Gallagher, with his earpieces still on, heard the message which he had shut out come spluttering out of the night. It had been relayed from the _Carpathia_. She was picking up the _Titanic_ survivors. Upon the old barkentine the news of the disaster fell like a thunderclap, and the fear of death took each of them by the throat.