LUKE – DRUNKEN SHIPS CAPTAIN – 17TH CENTURY By SpiritualDictionary.com
Geoff – We are now going back another 100 or 200 years and there is an old sailing ship, a very big one, this was a cargo ship not a war ship and very big, it has run aground and is breaking up, the cargo it was carrying is timber, and it was only carrying it a short distance. It wasn’t in England, it was out in the East somewhere around the Australian Islands somewhere there. Dad was the captain of this ship, and it was a regular ship to pick up the timber, he worked for the company who owned the ship and enjoyed a few drinks.
And in this particular life, he was very adventurous and carefree and willing gamble a lot.
He had too much of a carefree attitude, very confident that he could get a job when needed and look after himself, and on this particular occasion he had too much to drink and crew also, up on the front with him, had too much to drink, there was no discipline on board this ship, it was a very casual ship, and they got too close to a reef going between islands, which was a trip they had done a hundred times, there was plenty of room but the seemed to take a corner too sharply, and started to take away the left hand side of the boat and as this happened the catching pulled the boat to the left and it went over on its side and scraped deeper and deeper into the reef, with the cargo being timber, and this is timber in planks not trees, it was all open, there was no hatches, the water got in a water-logged them very smartly and just created an awful mess.
The weight of the ship then meant that it couldn’t get off the reef and it slowly started to break up. The reef was only maybe 100 meters from the shore, and where this ship is you could almost, if it wasn’t for the waves breaking, you could almost get off and walk up a bit down the other side and there was 50 yards of water and then the beach.
The seas weren’t all the rough but there was a fairly strong swell, when the ship started to break up and collapse and fall apart, many of the crew, there weren’t many only 7, they decided their best chance, because of the wind and the lean of the ship, so they thought their best chance was to go over the reef and onto the beach. They should have known better, they left in the middle of the ship where the reef was protected by the ship being there, they had started to move up the reef although there was water going towards it, it was not even waist deep, the ship moved and sent a slightly larger wave that knocked everybody off their feet and across the reef and started to cut them to pieces, doing a lot of damage, some were knocked unconscious right away, and the force of being pushed along the reef, others were cut up badly and 4 people were killed. 2 got over but got cut up very badly and died in the water.
The captain was still on the ship because tradition said the captain had to be the last to leave and so on, and in his drunken state found it very difficult to make the right decision about what to do and as the ship broke up around him he drowned.
Miriam (Ishmael) – You are quite right about everything, but he was bitterly disappointed when he came over I may tell because he did not learn many lessons in that life. He was too carefree and he regretted, but there you are, that is the things we go through, many times.
