CHOST SHIPS.

BY HARRY TOBIN

Once you have given up your shore life and elected the sea life and the customary daily practice and the routine onboard a vessel - settled in the ship's company- accepting the rule of the sea to become a subject in the tiny master institute with the everlasting commands,- then you are a sailor. You will have your regular meals, your bunk with bed bedclothes and the monthly issue of American cigarettes and whisky. That tiny master -institute, so-called shipboard, give all this to you, and you, what you have to give to the shipping life? You give out your liberty; you provide your service, there is a difference between work and service - although you could hear some landlubber saying, he is going to emparking the working onboard a ship. The duty onboard a ship is a service, and it means 'in this ship you must to work'.

The Winter in 1963 in the baltic sea was great cold, by February the whole sea covered with ice, so thick that every ship above sixty northern latitudes north-was needs the breaker's assistance to be conveying them to the ports. There was no water in sight, just the icy around, withe mantel of frozen.

I was that time service aboard the steamer named 'petäjäs', she was a Finn and so was all he crew. The midship's gang too, so speaking all them very pompous characters and types, baring that everlasting classic colonial style of offices and behaviours, they cep distance to the common sailors added even the youngest boy formality. The chief engineer was so fat that he was imposable to use the ladder down below to engine room so he could just be peeping over the rail down low to the engine room. Frankly, he was a useless and unskill person aboard. The second useless was the captain, a landsman and farmer who took more care of his coys at the home farm than the ship and the sea which of he seemed to be integrated- as the idiom goes; he was *Alla at sea'.of the matter.

The chief mate was a real set up man and the only commander aboard. He played his role as a slave driver, idolised Germany, and had as an ss man's status, that why he had gained his nickname; Wolf Larsen and has sometimes been injured whether he has that customary blood group tattooed under his arm. Every time such a question caused terrible fighting and the odo aboard the ship. The second mate was an old and tiny man from a coastal village, he wor shepherd and had a distance to his position aboard, he wore sheepskin rube closes and was afraid the crew member and the chef mate which both em' teased his every attempt to command