Transcriber’s Note. Italic text is indicated with _underscores_, bold text with =equals=. Small/mixed capitals have been replaced with ALL CAPITALS. THE ODYSSEY OF A TORPEDOED TRAMP BY Y LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 1918 PART ONE S.S. “PAMIR,” OFF THE COAST OF MOROCCO, _August 22, 1914_. DEAR OLD THING, You must be wondering what has become of me in this unholy mix-up. How far it seems to our Fourteenth of July in New Orleans when we said good-bye at the Dollar Bar after a cake-walk to the sound of the gramophone! Here goes for my tale of woe. Well, the _Pamir_ was loading her cotton--five thousand bales--up to the twenty-fifth of July. It was hottish and we were in a hurry to clear for Liverpool and find cooler weather. The news, too, seemed a bit inflammable. American papers were getting up stunts in big headlines over Serbia and the rest, but we thought it a “try-on” of the pro-German press and the Hearst crowd. You guess we were glad to be going to see what was happening in France and what the old things thought about it. We got under way at 2 a.m. At the start a d---- great sea-elephant just missed ramming us, but the Old Man steered like a wizard. I took the watch at three o’clock for Blangy, who was having a touch of fever and had been loading up with quinine for two days. The ship nearly had sunstroke in the Gulf! Ninety-five on the bridge, one hundred and four in the cabin--not a breath of wind! In the Atlantic it freshened up a bit and Blangy reported fit again. The boat was doing ten knots and a bittock, but at the end of three days our engine started racing like the very devil. The propeller shaft broke off short about a yard from the thrust block. We must have run into a submerged spar which had fouled the screw. It wouldn’t surprise me if a chunk of the propeller had gone to the bottom. No good trying the S.O.S. stunt, as we have no wireless! Muriac, the engineer, was a wonder. He found some way of forging on our wretched anvil a couple of steel collars which he fixed on to the two broken ends of the shaft with eight bolts. That took two days. You can imagine how Old Man Fourgues cursed to see himself a-floatin’ like a bloomin’ buoy in the middle of the sea. You figure him, with his slant eyes and his goatee, shouting down the engine-room hatch every five minutes: “Hullo there! Muriac! Will your turnspit be ready to turn by the time the grapes are ripe?” “Another hour--maybe two!” yells Muriac. “But for God’s sake leave us alone!”