Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [76]
They drifted for the better part of the day, picking up a few more survivors before catching a current and losing sight of land. As the raft drifted along, Parham and two others decided their best chance at survival lay in jumping overboard and swimming toward the mountaintops visible on the horizon. Four hours of hard swimming paid an unexpected dividend: A mile from the Java beach, an outrigger canoe found them. Two natives were at the oars, but the hands that hauled them aboard were American. Ens. John B. Nelson was in charge of the craft, having leased it from natives for rescue work for the price of his U.S. Naval Academy ring. It bought Parham’s life, but no one on the lifeboat he had originally abandoned—not Commander Smith nor anyone else—was ever seen again.
At least one other native caught the entrepreneurial spirit, but this one overplayed his hand. A Javanese at the helm of a fishing boat motored up to a group of struggling Houston survivors, meaning to do some brisk business. “This jerk was picking up guys if they could pay him something of value,” seaman second class William M. Ingram Jr. said. “He kept picking up exhausted guys, more and more of them, and taking their wedding bands, money, and watches. All I had was a jackknife on a lanyard tied to my belt, and a cheap ring I’d picked up in Honolulu,” Ingram said. “The native wanted both of them. I gave him what he wanted because, hell, I had to get on that boat, and there wasn’t any time to bargain.” Eventually, outraged by the price gouging, a bunch of the Americans rose and, said Ingram, “threw his ass overboard.”
In their new boat, Ingram and his shipmates headed for land, fighting stiff currents all the way. As they passed close by a small island, several sailors got anxious and jumped for it, only to get swept away by the fast-moving water. Sometimes staying with a raft saved you. Other times it was a sure route to oblivion; by inference, more than a few rafts had to have been swept into the Indian Ocean. Ingram’s remaining group made it to the beach, but their lucky judgment did them no good. “We weren’t ashore five minutes when along came a bunch of Jap soldiers, who took us prisoner,” he recalled.
Exhausted from treading water, Jim Gee paddled in search of something buoyant to cling to, finally catching sight of a Seagull floatplane pontoon drifting loose. As he approached, he found a bunch of Houston survivors holding on to it, perhaps twenty of them, some badly burned. The ship’s chaplain, Cdr. George S. Rentz, was among them, doing what he had been put on the earth to do: minister to those in need.
Gee had little need of his chaplain’s services. The Marine private was not injured, merely tired. He clutched the side of the float, gathering strength and wind for another run toward shore. When he finally set out again, he discovered that no one, not even a strong-swimming Marine, could contend with the currents off Java. “I could feel myself being carried out to sea. There are certain things you can just tell. I could tell that I wasn’t going in a straight path.” He found just enough strength to return to the pontoon.
Gee got back in time to witness the making of a Navy legend. Chaplain Rentz, at fifty-nine, had been the oldest man on the ship, nine years senior to Captain Rooks and only about a year away from retirement when the Houston went down. The native of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, had been a pastor at churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before joining the Navy during World War I. That war was nearly over when Rentz, as a junior-grade lieutenant, was named acting chaplain to the Eleventh Marine Regiment, deployed to France in October 1918, just a month before the armistice. After the war, Rentz fulfilled a series of sea-duty assignments in the peacetime Navy, making commander in 1924. He needed nearly two decades more to find his ultimate calling as shepherd to the survivors of a U.S. Navy cruiser in extremis.
The surplus