Page 194 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

however, if it was blowing from astern at a speed above the ship’s, the deck
could be covered with soot if the fuel mixture were unbalanced.

We departed Southampton bound for Gibraltar, where I again declined to
go ashore, having just left English beer anyway. One little contretemps disturbed
our departure, however; a missing passenger (though where one could get lost
in this port was a mystery) and we left late on his account, steaming towards
Naples, two days away.

The passenger complement did not lead me to believe that this would be an
exciting voyage, though I had not inspected the possibilities directly because my
rank now precluded supervision of the lifebelt drill. This disadvantage, being
much the same as on Oriana, I could accommodate without difficulty; things
would improve in Australia.
In Naples, we were greeted on the quay by our passenger who had missed
the ship in Gibraltar; he had enjoyed quite the experience in rejoining us. He had
quickly been to our agent’s office in Gibraltar and been found a flight out – but
not to Italy. Because of the virtual blockade by Spain of the British colony, there
were no aircraft connections to anywhere other than to UK (no other nations
wished to alienate Spain, so European destinations other than in UK were simply
not available) he had then had to fly back to London, then fly to Rome (there were
no direct London to Naples flights) and from there get to Naples as best he could.
I am glad to say that he reached the ship’s berth on time to clamber aboard, but
he only just made it. He had little choice, because he was a civil servant stationed
in Aden; to get there without Canberra would have proved a very daunting task.

Sailing south through the Straits of Messina, we began to realise that
international (Middle East) news was beginning to assume unusual importance.
It appeared that Egypt and its allies – Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon and eight
other Arab nations – had suddenly declared the Straits of Tiran (the narrow
entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, at the head of which lay Aqaba and (Israel’s) Eilat)
to be closed to Israeli shipping. Israel had earlier declared that the closure of
this waterway would be a casus bello, a warning supposedly unnecessary because
in 1956 Egypt had guaranteed that the passage would remain open after the
cessation of those earlier hostilities.

The news that we received (the R/O’s were very busy) was that on June 5th, the
Israelis had taken pre-emptive action. Firstly, they had destroyed most of the Arab
air forces while they were at their airfields (and had used the tactical advantage
of time-delayed tarmac-penetrating bombs to render the runways operationally
irreparable) and at the same time attacked the Egyptian armies in the Sinai by not
driving down the ‘paved’ roads (which the Egyptians had carefully blocked with
their tanks, presumably because they thought that the Israelis would invade by

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