Violet Constance Jessop—Lucky Nurse or Dangerous Saboteur?
I’m going to tell you a story, but I doubt you’ll believe me.
Now, depending how you look at this, Violet Constance Jessop is one of the luckiest people in history or one of the most dangerous. She was born on the 2nd of October, 1887, in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. She died May 5th, 1971 in Great Ashfield, Suffolk, England.
What she did in between defies belief.
She was a slim woman, some would say pretty, with hair the color of ravens. Having made her way to the British Isles, she garnered employment as a ship’s stewardess with the White Star shipping line, of which you may be familiar. The White Star, over the years, had more than it’s fair share of difficulties over the years in the risky business of traversing the Atlantic during both peace and wartime.
But I digress.
Violet’s first posting with the White Star line was aboard the Olympic, where she served with humility and comported herself with both poise and dignity.
Or did she?
Upon it’s fifth voyage, with Violet aboard, the Olympic had her first major mishap of what would turn out to be many over the years, causing some to call her–ironically, I might add–“Old Reliable.” It was September 20th, 1911, a sunny day with clear skies and gentle seas, whereby the Olympic collided with the British cruiser HMS Hawke.
The collision took place as Olympic and Hawke were running parallel to each other through the Solent. As Olympic turned to starboard, the wide radius of her turn took the commander of Hawke by surprise, and he was unable to take sufficient avoiding action. Hawke’s bow, which had been designed to sink ships by ramming them, collided with Olympic’s starboard side near the stern, tearing two large holes in Olympic’s hull, above and below the waterline, resulting in the flooding of two of her watertight compartments and a twisted propeller shaft.
Although the Olympic was barely able to return to Suffolk under her own power, she did, in fact, managed the feat, and, after some significant repairs, was returned to service.
Jessop lived to tell the tale.
Then, in April of 1912, Violet Constance Jessop was aboard the Titanic.
Now, I won’t bore you with the details of that fateful voyage. Surely, you must know how it went as it made its way into the North Atlantic. The Titanic sank, taking many down with her. However, coincidentally or not, the staggeringly lucky (dare I say competent) Miss Jessop managed to board a lifeboat and escape with her life in tact.
It wasn’t long after when, instead of stewardess, the supremely fortunate young woman accepted work as a nurse aboard the Britannic, the Titanic’s sister ship. This was during the First World War, of course, whereby the luxury cruise liner had been converted into the largest hospital ship ever put into service up to that point.
I feel it’s important to note here that the Britannic was launched just before the start of the First World War. She was designed to be the safest of the three ships in the White Star line, with design changes made during construction due to lessons learned from the sinking of the Titanic.
She was laid up at her builders, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast for many months before being requisitioned as a hospital ship. In 1915 and 1916 she served between the United Kingdom and the Dardanelles.
On the morning of November 21st, 1916, with Violet Constance Jessop aboard, she was allegedly shaken by the detonation of an Imperial German naval mine. This was near the Greek island of Kea
The Britannia sank 55 minutes later, taking 30 living souls with her. Yet, once again, Violet was not among the dead. She did, for a third and most remarkable time in succession, survive yet another maritime disaster of the White Star Line.
According to Jessop’s memoirs, she allegedly made it to a lifeboat before the ship sank, but when it got into the water, everyone but her ditched it because it couldn’t get loose of Britannic’s propellers.
Of course, Jessop, who had improbably never learned to swim, finally followed suit and jumped off the lifeboat. She was evidently saved by her lifejacket and lived to the ripe old age of 84.
The moral of this story: beware of dark-haired Argentinian women at sea bearing a grudge.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi—Hunted by Truman?
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in the blast zone for BOTH A-bombs.
He was working in Hiroshima the day the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Yamaguchi was thrown into the air by the impact, but survived the blast and went back home to Nagasaki.
There, he ended up in the blast zone of the second A-bomb in the most improbable way. Apparently, Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the devastation in Hiroshima. His boss countered, “‘How could one bomb … destroy a whole city?’ … [At that moment] a white light swelled inside the room. … ‘I thought,’ he later recalled, ‘the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima.’”
Amazingly, he still lived to be 93 years old.
Edgar Allan Poe novel—Author or Prognosticator?
In Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the crew of a damaged and adrift ship are forced to kill and eat Richard Parker. The crew also ate a tortoise.
A few decades later, a real-life yacht named the Mignonette sank in a storm in the Indian Ocean. The four-man crew escaped to a dinghy but didn’t have time to stock many provisions. Like the men in Poe’s story, at one point they ate a tortoise. And, like the men in Poe’s story, they resorted to eating one of their own in a horrifying, but potentially necessary, case of cannibalism.
The unlucky young man’s name? Richard Parker.
