"Just for the Hell of It" : 329 



rior. She carried a single mast witli a not very effective lug sail. Bru- 

 del christened her the Vraad. It is hard to imagine v^^hat inducements 

 he offered, but somehow he persuaded a crew of three other men 

 to sail with him. On June 27 they climbed into the dark and for- 

 bidding interior of this strange vessel and sailed from Aalesund, 

 Norway, headed for some vague destination on the American shore. 



The Vraad was painfully slow but at least she demonstrated her 

 ability to remain afloat. Summer came and went without the vessel 

 being reported. At last in the fall she appeared off the coast of Nova 

 Scotia. She had proceeded as far as the Bay of Fundy when a winter 

 gale came howling out of the northwest and the tank was blown 

 out to sea again. Twice more she worked her way toward the coast 

 and each time was caught by another storm. She was still at sea on 

 Christmas Day — she was still at sea when the first day of 1905 rolled 

 around, then, on January 7, she came under the beam of Eastern 

 Point lighthouse in Gloucester Harbor. 



Captain Brudel and his men had then spent 215 days in their 

 eighteen-foot length of icy metal. They may be pardoned for being 

 weary and confused. They did not know the harbor and apparently 

 they did not understand the meaning of the American harbor lights 

 so they drove their extraordinary craft high and dry on the shore. 

 When they staggered up the beach they had at least demonstrated 

 the capacity of the human being to stand punishment and to survive. 



1867 was the year in which Wilkes sailed his life raft to England 

 in fifty-two days. This was almost twice the amount of time that it 

 took an ordinary sailing dory in the same year to make the passage 

 between Gloucester and Southampton. Miller and Lawton were the 

 crew of this dory, and the time of their passage was recorded as 

 twenty-seven days. They seem to have set the pattern for a whole 

 succession of ocean passages in sailing dories and other small vessels. 



These were more fun, more sensible and more effective than the 

 dreary trip of Brudel's barrel. Following Miller and Lawton, the 

 next passage was notable in that it was made from Europe to Amer- 

 ica, which is always more difficult in our latitudes than a passage 

 from the west to the east. The crossing is reported in Leslie's Illus- 

 trated Newspaper under the date July 16, 1870. 



J. C. Buckley had secured a ship's lifeboat. He reconditioned her, 

 decked her over and rigged her as a yawl. In this new condition she 

 was christened the City of Ragusa. Buckley became the captain and 

 a man named Harper became the one-man crew. They sailed from 

 Liverpool to Boston and made the passage in ninety-eight days. 



