In the autumn of 1980, Voyager 1 swept past Saturn at 50,000 miles an hour, after a journey of three years and nearly one billion miles.
As the small spacecraft sent back to earth dramatically detailed images of the far-off planet, an American ship, the SS POET, sailed from Philadelphia, bound for Egypt with 13,000 tons of corn. Unlike the unmanned silver speck calling from distant space, the POET was nearly two football fields long, crewed by 34 merchant seamen and powered by 9000 horsepower engines. The ship was equipped with a modern array of navigational and communications gear as well as required life-saving equipment; she was inspected and certified seaworthy by all the responsible federal agencies and maritime organizations.
Two days off the East Coast and in some of the world's busiest shipping lanes, the POET and her men vanished. Not a trace ... not a SOS not a life jacket, not an oil slick, no debris, not a body or a lightbulb, nothing ... of the POET and her crew have been found to this day, a mystery as complete as it is unprecedented.
What was the ship the SS POET, who were the 34 mariners who disappeared with her and what happened to them? For several years I have worked at answering these questions. The result is THE POET VANISHES: AN AMERICAN VOYAGE.
Robert J. Pessek spent more than three years of interviews, research, and travel to put together the pieces of The POET Vanishes: An American Voyage.
The son of an immigrant, Pessek was raised on a small farm in Minnesota; his first six years of education were in a 2-room rural school. After filling station, factory and fry cook jobs, and two years overseas with the US Army, he sailed in the saltwater merchant marine. One of Pessek's ships was a sister of the POET and his other vessels ranged from fast, new freighters to rustbuckets kept from the scrapyard only by the demands of the Vietnam War. Later he spent three summers on Great Lakes ore boats.
Pessek attended the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill and an academic scholarship; he has a masters degree from Northwestern University and studied at the Free University of Berlin.
As a journalist, Pessek worked for a small daily in Wisconsin and then spent seven years with The Kansas City Star. His datelines have included Central America, Northern Ireland, and Africa.
Currently, he is a planner with the Boston Parks & Recreation Department.
The American ship is born on this Monday of April 3, 1944.
From a fabricating bay in the plate shop of a bustling California shipyard, a 5-ton crane carefully hoists a sheet of steel that is one inch thick, 5-feet, 4-inches wide and 34 feet long. It's good, heavy steel--shipfitters call it 40-pound plate, and that's what a square foot of the metal weighs.
The 6,800-pound load is swung from the shop to an even bigger crane that wheels the steel to a building basin where it is slowly lowered into place.
More plates of the same size are craned, out and laid end to end in a lengthening strip that becomes a single spine as welders join them in an industrial ceremony of fire and smoke. Thus is laid the keel of an as yet unnamed ship of war; soon these individual and very unbuoyant masses of heavy steel bloom under the welder's torch and riveter's hammer into the recognizable contours of a mammoth vessel.
As the ship takes raw form, it is spring in a world at war for five long years. The United States only reluctantly became a belligerent, yet in barely three years it has emerged a leader among the embattled nations.
A few statistics underline America's growing international importance: To date the US has sent 9 1/2 million tons of supplies to the Soviet Union alone, carried mostly on US merchant ships. But not all of the war goods reach the Red Army; U-boat wolf packs make the North Atlantic run deadly. Frank Holland, just turned 22, knows the treachery of those waters. His ship in a Murmansk-bound convoy was sunk; luck was with Holland and he was rescued from the frigid seas north of Norway where many seamen die alone. It was months before he made it home to Baltimore and after a brief family visit, Holland caught another vessel. His second ship in a row was sunk but once again he lived to beat the Atlantic odds.
Such perils at sea are often blurred by revelry ashore. And Holland, a seafarer for five years, is no exception. As he carouses, the tattoos across his body grow in variety and include a hula girl needled into his calf that 'dances' with her wearer's wiggling muscles.
The American ability to produce and deliver encompasses all the fronts and many armies in this big war; just last month, US aircraft companies sent skyward a record 9118 airplanes. To finance this gargantuan contribution of military machines and personnel, the Fifth War
Loan has opened and is expected to -raise $16 billion in four weeks.
Overseas, the war is being carried nearer and nearer the enemies' backyards, dramatized as the Russian Army smashes into Rumania--the first time Soviet forces have fought the Germans beyond their own borders. Czechoslovakia remains occupied by Nazi forces, but in the Moravian village of Boretice, south of Brno and 13 miles from the Austrian frontier, the war is a distant storm rather than a daily ordeal. A modest river flows through the town and on its banks runs a railway. Watching train operations has given Joseph Vyhnak, a schoolboy of 15, a youthful interest in telegraphy.
In the US, growing optimism about the conflict's end is reflected by thoughts of a postwar world while Congress discusses demobilization. But the war is far from over. On this April day that the keel is laid for a vessel on the West Coast, the Army reports 814 of its soldiers killed, wounded or missing while the Navy suffers 243 casualties. Allied troops continue to take heavy losses on the pinned-down Anzio beachhead while still awaited is the cross-Channel invasion from England.
In the Far East, the Japanese have invaded as far as northern India. At the Solomon Islands, however, American fighting men hold their beachheads and 100,000 enemy troops are cut off in the southwest Pacific as ship-carried Allied forces began island hopping into hostile territory. Calvin Bethard is a teen-aged veteran among the atolls in his second year with the Seabees. After high school in Los Angeles, Bethard followed thousands of his contemporaries and joined up, hitting boot camp at barely 18 in a compressed process that swiftly turns soft-faced youths into warriors.
Delivering the armies and their armament to the Pacific, European and other battle zones are civilian-crewed merchant ships such as Holland sails. Leroy Warren is another of these non-uniformed sailors and at 20 he already has three years at sea. On his left bicep is a freshly tattooed, rose; from the flower's center blossoms an exotic young woman. Warren's romantic impulses reflected by the artwork on his arm not infrequently clash with a mariner's harsh life--recently a ship alongside Warren's was hit and he watched helplessly as all hands, including a close friend, died in the convulsing blasts and flames.
