036- The Brute

Getting impatient for baseball season to start. Have a touch of spring fever. Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Who are in mid-ocean? A board of jinx ship? Already nine men have died.

And you know that some malignant forces aimed at you from which you cannot escape. Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure. Tonight, we escaped on the North Atlantic in the year 1900, and to a sailing ship whose very name struck dread in sailor's hearts.

As Joseph Conrad told it in his famous story, the brute. Tell it just by looking at her, proud and strong and beautiful on the outside. You couldn't see the black heart inside of her, and you'd never know.

She'd killed at least a dozen men and maybe more. Well, I knew her. for the murder in she debulcy was. I saw the day she killed her first one and I was there too when she finally made a big mistake and killed the wrong person. Well that was a long time later.

Well she had a name all right but after that first day her first killing nobody with the family ever used it again. Everyone else from that day on would look at her half a frayed and half snarling and And they called her the brute.

I remember I was 14 the day my father took me down to the South Thames bowyard to watch the launching of the ship. My brother Charlie was there of course, eight years older than me and very proud of his one girl's strike.

Now that he'd be made an officer on the Apse line. Charlie and father were talking. I just stood and listened to him and didn't say much of anything myself. Look at her dad. Ever seen a ship in your life with lines like that?