At midnight she was first spotted as a distant shape on the moonlit horizon. By dawn her dimensions had grown to majestic size. Passengers and crew of the British liner crowded the rail to stare at the tall ship they were overtaking She seemed an apparition from another age. A graceful, white-hulled bark, her four masts crowded with wind-taut sails, she belonged on an earlier ocean, on sea-lanes as yet unsullied by the smoke and soot of steamers.
The captain of the liner rang his engine-room telegraph and signaled for more power. He would give his passengers something to remember; he would close in swiftly on this old windjammer, dramatically cross her bows and then proceed on course for Rio de Janeiro. But on board the big steel bark in the South Atlantic that October morning in 1934, Captain Sven Eriksson had other ideas. To him, the Herzogin Cecilie, the 32 year-old ship under his command, was no weather-beaten anachronism; outbound from Belfast, Ireland, for Port Lincoln, South Australia, to take
