What happens
Christopher Warner, a young man who has spent two months collecting in the Venezuelan jungle, has hired the guide Sanchez to capture a live bushmaster, the deadliest snake in the world, for a museum in New York. Warner boards the liner Chan Kay with the snake in a locked sea chest, and Captain Wood reluctantly allows it aboard on condition that it be kept secret. When the crate is discovered missing, the ship's officers search in vain while passengers and crew grow frightened. The story is a tense shipboard drama built around that hunt, and it is told in the present day of a 1947 episode of the CBS anthology series Escape, written by Martin Storm and starring Jack Webb.
A passenger liner sailing from La Guaira, Venezuela, toward New York, and the jungle of the Orinoco region of Venezuela.
Characters: Christopher Warner, Captain Wood, Mother Willis, Mr. Bowman, Sanchez, Clara
Listen for: The rattle and hiss of the bushmaster and the sudden silence that follows the discovery of the snake in the galley.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.