Ships & Skippers

Last week, after a bare decade of service, the Minnewaska and Minnetonka, 22,000-ton sister ships of once-famed Atlantic Transport Line, were sold for junk. As ships go, these namesakes of a pair of pre-War liners were not old. The Mauretania, launched in 1907, and the Olympic, launched in 1911, are still in transatlantic trade. But the Minnetonka and Minnewaska, built for comfort in an age of speed, took eight days from New York to London.* Comparatively exclusive, they carried only 400 one-class passengers in cabins amidships. Biggest cargo ships afloat, they rode rough seas smoothly. But they were slow, and because they were slow International Mercantile Marine sold them to the "knackers" last week for 4-c- on the dollar--$12,000,000 worth of steel & iron & wood for less than $500,000.

Last boats of a famed old line, their passing meant to many an ocean traveler something more than the end of 44,000 tons of shipping and two proud names. It meant the last act in the great careers of the two old sea-dogs who had been their masters--the Minnewaska's Captain Frank H. Claret and the Minnetonka's Captain Thomas F. ("Giggles") Gates. To each of these, in their time, had come stirring moments in maritime history.

Once soon after the U.S. entered the War, Skipper Claret was taking the Minnehaha to Britain with a heavy cargo of TNT. Several days out of New York he received a radiogram from the U.S. Navy Department to the effect that a bomb hidden aboard his ship was timed to explode that very noon. Captain Claret ordered the crew to make a search drill, did not tell them why. When they failed to find anything, he stood anxiously on the bridge, waited watch in hand. Noon came & went. Nothing happened. Claret had about decided that it was a false alarm when at 12:30 the forward deck suddenly erupted. By some miracle the bomb had been planted on top of a small amount of ordinary freight, had failed to set off the tons of TNT aboard. Captain Claret and the Minnehaha sailed safely on.

But not for long. One day in September 1917 Captain Claret was standing on the bridge of the Minnehaha when a German submarine drilled her with a torpedo off the Head of Kinsale. Within two minutes the ship literally sank beneath Claret's feet and left him kicking in the water. Forty-three lives were lost. Captain Claret and more than 100 others floated more than an hour before a British patrol boat sighted them. The skipper of the patrol boat recognized the Minnehaha's captain in the water, boomed out: "I say, is that you, Claret?" "Aye, it's me!" Claret boomed back. Pneumonia nearly killed him after that.

"Giggles" Gates got his nickname from his cheery, infectious laugh. Equally famed was his powerful voice. He never used a megaphone when docking his ship, and many a sailor used to say no ship needed a foghorn so long as "Tommy" Gates was on the bridge. Sociable, he was known to many & many a passenger as a pipe-smoking, teetotaling skipper who danced two hours every night of clear weather. During the War he saved the lives of 1,800 troops and seamen by beaching the original Minnewaska on the Island of Crete after she had struck a mine in Mudro Bay. For that her master was decorated with the order of Commander of the British Empire by King George himself.

--After the Red Star Line took them over two years ago they plied between New York and Antwerp.

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