"Just for the Hell of It" : 333 



Blackburn, finding that his hands were becoming numb and that 

 they were continually slipping from the oar, decided to let them 

 freeze fast so that he would not again lose his grip. After five days 

 of continuous rowing he came into a Newfoundland port. After his 

 hands and parts of his arms had been amputated and he had other- 

 wise recovered, he was unable to secure employment as a fisherman. 



All that was left to him was to exploit his endurance and his 

 knowledge of the sea. After learning to use his artificial arms and 

 hands he built himself a little thirty-foot sloop, the Great Western, 

 and in 1889 sailed from Gloucester, Massachusetts to Gloucester, Eng- 

 land. In 1 891 he built a smaller vessel, the Great Republic, a sloop 

 twenty-five feet in length, which he sailed to Lisbon in thirty-nine 

 days. He made another attempt in a seventeen-foot dory, the America, 

 but this trip ended in failure, and Blackburn was picked up by a 

 passing vessel. On his return he established a shop in Gloucester 

 which he maintained for many years. 



The fantastic contrivances in which men have put to sea can be 

 almost indefinitely extended, but surely one of the strangest of all 

 was a collapsible German rubber boat of the sort that was popular in 

 Europe in the 20's, generally known as a faltboat — the folding boat. 

 Captain Franz Romer had one built that was slightly larger than the 

 ordinary two-place canoe. In 1920 he succeeded in sailing her from 

 Spain to the Canary Islands and from there to St. Thomas and the 

 West Indies. He was, therefore, successful in making the ocean pas- 

 sage in a craft that had about eighteen inches of freeboard. Compared 

 with this, the passage from St. Thomas to Santo Domingo should 

 have been for him only a brief outing. Unfortunately, he was caught 

 in a hurricane and lost. 



All of the stories up to the present time have dealt with boats 

 or other contrivances that were sailed across the ocean. However 

 strange they may appear, they hardly prepare us for the final surprise 

 which leaves an indelible impression regarding man's relationship to 

 the Atlantic Ocean. 



In 1896 a Mr. Richard K. Fox, of New York, speculated on whether 

 it were possible to row across the ocean. Two New Jersey fishermen 

 of Norwegian origin, George Firbo and Frank Samuelson, decided 

 that they would try the passage entirely under oars. They had a skiff 

 built by a New Jersey boatbuilder named Seeman, something like a 

 Seabright dory. The boat was eighteen feet long with a five-foot 

 maximum beam. 



They left the Battery in New York on June 6. The boat was chris- 



