On Friday March 10, 1944, the British ship MV Tulagi left Sydney, Australia, proceededing down the New South Wales Coast, and, via the Bass Strait rounded Cape Leuwin and on into the Indian Ocean. Seventeen days later, on March 27, 1944, with a full complement of fifty-four on board (16 Europeans, 26 Indian, 7 Malay and five gunners of the Royal Australian Navy) she was torpedoed by the German Submarine U-532 commanded by Fregattenkapitan Ottoheinrich Junker of the First Monsun Group operating out of Penang, Malaysia. Of the 54 original crew members only 15 survived the torpedo attack, of which 8 were later lost.
In SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: And The Last American Darshan I make reference to the Tulagi, especially so the lost eight. In doing so, like many of my works, when I throw in such a tid-bit of information, for whatever reason it goads certain people to no end. The sentence below, which appears at the source so cited, is one of those tid-bits and refers in a round about way to the lost Tulagi eight:
"The Liverpool letter, except for several long incoherent paragraphs about picking up a live survivor or two or none at all amongst several dead in a life raft sometime before arriving or after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, circulated mostly around the logistics of bringing me home."
Why would the above quote "goad" anybody? Mostly because people are always looking for kernals no matter how large or small to discredit what I have presented in the Last American Darshan. They know, for example, if the liferaft story can be shown to be unsound then the whole of the thesis so presented could be suspect.
The letter so mentioned in the quote was written by the woman of a couple that took me, as a young boy, to India. In the letter she indicated that a liferaft was encountered in some fashion by the ship we were on during our return trip to England. How she worded it wasn't totally clear and could be deciphered, at least in how I read it, in a number of ways. It was clear in what she said that there was a liferaft, but IF the liferaft was encountered before or after Cape Town or IF there were or were not survivors was muddled, hence the reason I wrote the sentence the way I did. She didn't elaborate one way or the other or attempt to clarify the event because anything regarding the liferaft had nothing at all to do to do with the point she was trying to get across in the letter. The thing is, that tiny tid-bit sets the scene for the timing when I was in and left India.
Now, while it is true I wrote the sentence, I was really recounting for the reader what she wrote. However, that doesn't make the contents have any less import. When I wrote the whole of the paragraph including the sentence I could have easily chosen to have left it out and nobody would have been any wiser. I could have even deleted it later. Instead I chose to research down the accuracy of her observations, which, if being correct, would add additional credence to my meeting with the Bhagavan and any eventual outcome under his auspices so claimed.[1]
The foremost chronicler of my visit to India, Ramana adherent C.R. Rajamani speaking of his own visit to the ashram of the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, relates that he was not certain about the date or the month he was there. He writes:
"(I)t may have been December or January. I remember the season was quite cool. The summit of the holy mountain Arunachala was shrouded in dense mist and clouds. The morning air was crisp and pleasant."
Rajamani states that the couple was in India to attend the Theosophical Society's world convention which was usually held at their world headquarters at Adyar, Madras in December-January.[2] I put the couple, with me in tow, at the Ramana ashram in the January side of things. Rajamani writes:
"Within an hour of his face-to-face meeting with Sri Bhagavan, his mental barriers were reduced to nothingness. He shed tears for quite some time and later said to his mother, 'I am so happy. I don't want to leave his presence. I want to be always with him!' His mother was most upset. She pleaded with Sri Bhagavan, 'Swami, please release my son! He is our only child. We will be miserable without him.' Sri Bhagavan smiled at her and said, 'Release him? I am not keeping him tied up. He is a mature soul. A mere spark has ignited his spiritual fire.'"
As the events at the ashram unfolded Ramana made it clear that I should go with my parents, that is, return to BE with my REAL parents, back in America, my destiny was not in India at that time. Ramana, understanding the soon to be outcome of things on a spiritual level, meant for my return to America and the rejoining with my real parents to transpire as expediant as possible --- while my mother was still alive and my father was still in control of his well being. Even though the couple followed Ramana's advice and took me back to America, they did so at their own leisure and in a roundabout way. By the time I arrived home my mother had passed away with the funeral completed and over, my brothers scattered to the four winds, and my father gone.
The couple, after arriving in New York and not wanting to return me to the west coast because my immediate family had disintegrated, plus I guess, possibly face any potential wrath from remaining family members that knew about the situation and or who may have misinterpreted their intentions, took it upon themselves to just dump me off unannounced at my grandmother's house on my father's side in a small little town located in the lower southeast corner of Pennsylvania --- a grandmother who I had never met in my life nor ever even heard about.
Then somehow, after being left with my grandmother on my father's side in Pennsylvania, at least as it was told to me by my uncle years later, and he didn't remember or know how or how long I was there, I was returned to California to be with my grandmother on my mother's side --- but NOT by the couple. They basically disappeared after Pennsylvania and to my knowledge never heard from again.
On the morning of Friday March 10, 1944, while I was in India, totally unrelated and unbeknownst to me or anybody involved with me or the parties I was with, the MV Tulagi, loaded with a cargo of flour and 380 bags of mail left Australia for Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) under control and orders of the British Admiralty.
At noon Monday March 27 the Tulagi was expected to pass 300 nautical miles east of Chagos Archipelago. At about ten minutes past midnight Tuesday March 28 as she reached the position 11 degrees 00 minutes South, 78 degrees 40 minutes, East the Tulagi was attacked and struck by two torpedoes from the German submarine U-532. The Tulagi sank in 20 seconds, stern first then rolling to starboard. Only 15 crew members survived.
Those 15 survivors, using their wits and wile in the dark of the night and in the middle of the Indian Ocean, were able to lash together four rafts along with items of equipment and stores removed from a few lifeboats that broke loose as the ship sank. The rafts were open 6 x 8 x 3 feet with forty-four gallon drums as flotation devices housed in open wooden frame. The rafts could be operated from either side and 10 persons could easily fit into each raft. The 15 sailors divided into three groups of five with one group in each of three rafts with the fourth saved as a spare. During a storm the rafts began banging together so bad the spare raft was cut loose.
Because so little progress was being made with three rafts lashed together, on April 21 the survivors divided into two groups, seven in one raft, eight in the other, cutting loose the the third raft. They rigged a sail on one of the rafts pulling the other. Several times the rafts broke apart and each time the crews were able to relash them. However, at about 4:00 PM Friday May 19 the lashing used to hold the two rafts together broke for the last time and the rafts drifted apart, eventually the distance widening so much they lost sight of each other.
On Tuesday May 25 at 10:00 in the morning, after allowing for leeway, currents and steering, drifting an estimated 2160 nautical miles (2485 statue miles) and 58 days after the Tulagi was torpedoed, members of one of the rafts sighted an island about five miles to the west. Two more islands were observed. They decided to make for the smallest of the islands as it was the closest. Around 11:10 PM they landed on Bijoutier, a tiny island of the Alphonse Group belonging to the Outer Islands of the Seychelles.
Ten days later, on Friday June 9 a piece of at least one the remaining three rafts was found on the island of St. Francis some 5 miles to the south of where the known survivors landed. A search revealed no evidence of the other victims or any other parts of the raft. No one knows their eventual fate. It is thought the personel on the second raft did not survive after it drifted from sight on May 19, 1944.
So, what does all of the above have to do with the letter writer's account of encountering a liferaft on the voyage from India? It has to do with what liferaft it was and where it came from. There is no doubt that both the Germans and the Allies kept fairly accurate records of sinkings of ships and submarines during the war. Those records, for the most part, unless they were secert missions, are available one way or the other to those so interested. In the case of the liferaft observed by the letter writer, the Tulagi sinking that resulted in the survivors endeavors as presented above, is the only one that meets all the necessary criteria of time, place, and location.
The problem is, IF the letter writer's ship had interacted with the liferaft and found just one live survivor, OR even brought a lifeboat of dead sailors on board at the most, or indentified the dead and left or buried them at sea at the least, it would seem that, because of the impeccable record keeping, the results of such a find would easily be obtainable. The thing is, there is no record of such an event. So, what's the answer?
Most of what has been presented regarding the fate of the Tulagi and it's crew has been garnered from the primary source for information surrounding the event: The Voyage of the Survivors of the MV Tulagi by Captain S.J. (Mick) Costelloe. In his compilation of events Costelloe writes:
"During the afternoon Thursday 30 March a ship was sighted approaching from North. She was zig zagging, the vessel was signaled with a flare, the vessel came within 2 miles and victims on the rafts felt that they had been seen and would be picked up. Others in the raft noticed another vessel approaching fast from the north and this gave them high hopes of being rescued. As the second vessel came closer it was seen to be a submarine of the non friendly type. The submarine came within 1 mile, the crew of the submarine were noted to be looking at the raft, she then dived."
In a similar sighting one month later Costelloe writes:
"On Sunday 30 April (34 days into the drift) they saw smoke from a ship on the horizon, when she was closer the raft signaled using flares. To quote John Ward again "she came within a couple of miles of us but paid no attention to us. but they must have seen us, but went north on her zig zag course. The ship passed about 1700 hrs."
Even though the law of the sea would seem to indicate that when it comes to what should be done when survivors or potential survivors in liferafts are come upon, friend or foe alike, the results of such an encounter should be somehow humane in nature. In both cases above, although the survivors felt their liferaft had been "sighted," no attempt by either ship to assist was forthcoming. If they saw the liferafts and continued without helping most likely no record would be available because making record of such and event would be incriminating. Now it could be possible that one of the two ships was a ship the letter writer was on. However, when the two quoted events transpired the rafts were still lashed together and all 15 survivors were still alive. It is my opinion that the liferaft mentioned by the letter writer was the second of the two liferafts AFTER the rafts were separated, the one that was never heard from again. While it is true that on Friday June 9 a piece of one the other three rafts was found on the island of St. Francis some 5 miles to the south of where the known survivors landed, it does not mean the wreckage was from the second raft. That second raft could have continued on missing the islands all together only to be sighted later by the ship the letter writer was on. Again, if the liferaft was sighted and no matter how close they came BUT continued without helping or interacting, even if all aboard the raft were determined to be dead, most likely no record would be available because making record of such and event would be, as I have said, incriminating. It should be mentioned that in the first quote above a submarine of a non-friendly type was observed. Sometimes submarine commanders would use liferafts as a lure to get an unsuspecting vessel within effective torpedo range. It could be during an attempted rescue, before the ship could act, it was scared off --- however to cite such a scenario a known submarine would have to had been in the area, and there was no attempt by a submarine attacking the letter writer's ship noted in any of her writings --- an event that one would surely think would have been recorded.[3]
It is not known if you have gone to or read Footnote [1] or not, but before you move on I would like to make mention another faction of people who have their own bone to pick with what I have suggested regarding Tulagi survivors: historians and relatives of crew members. For those who may be so interested please visit Footnote [4].
THE SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
WORLD WAR II COMES TO REDONDO
GERMAN SUBMARINE ATTACK ON HOOVER DAM
THE ULTIMATE IN SHIPWRECKED SAILORS:
VIKINGS OF THE DESERT SOUTHWEST: THE LOST VIKING SHIP
CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT
ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE
THE WANDERLING
(please click)
Footnote [1]
As I have expressed above, I throw in tiny tid-bits of information here or there that for whatever reason seems to goad certain people to no end. In the Last American Darshan, the mention of the letters, then proving their validity --- say like with the lifeboat situation --- just seems to get to certain people. The question is why?
It has to do with how protective keepers of the Ramana flame can be. Take for example the highly respected and very pro-Ramana author David Godman who put together a small book about Annamalai Swami. The Swami was a former Ramana attendant and confidant that had Awakened to the Absolute through the grace and light of the Maharshi. The book contained transcripts of actual conversations between Annamalai and various seekers he met with at his ashram during the final months of his life. In it Godman included a few comments that came up regarding Sri Ramana's younger brother, Nagasundaram --- popularly known as Chinnaswami (the Younger Swami). The people at Ramana Ashram insisted the parts of the book related to Chinnaswami be expunged. Annamalai Swami agreed to a few of their requests but refused to delete others.
As to the Last American Darshan a good portion of the contents therein circulate around a talk C.R. Rajamani presented to the April 25, 1998 Aradhana program at Arunachala Ashrama in New York. Rajamani offers his observation that a boy he saw with a couple in the meditation hall at the Ramana ashram in the early-mid 1940s, being white, was a foreigner --- which on its own would not be too difficult to discern. However, he runs afoul in his designation as to the boy being of Australian descent. From the couple's accent Rajamani may have subjectively tagged the two of them as being from Australia, and thus then, assumed the boy (i.e., me) was too.
However, although any number of people have grabbed on to that, such was not the case. Rajamani was not an interview reporter. He was a Ramana adherent visiting and meditating in the ashram who presented through his writings what he saw through personal observations --- most probably garnered from a distant and written sometime after the fact. Please note by going to the Rajamani page that he starts out right away saying he was at the ashram in his early twenties and that he had been a devotee of Sri Ramana for over 55 years. He also says, in relation to the event that transpired between the Maharshi and the young boy, that the event was "still fresh in (his) memory." The conclusion to be drawn from such comments is that the contents of his article were NOT written on the scene in the 1940s, but possibly recalled some fifty or sixty years later specifically for the year 1998 Aradhana program. Please note on the page as well Rajamani's speculative use and emphasis on "PRESUMABLY the boy's father" and "I THOUGHT she was the boy's mother." Presumed and thought, not knew.
In an update to the Rajamani article, the most respected Professor Laxmi Narain, who compiled and edited the book entitled "Face to Face with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Enchanting and Uplifting Reminiscences of 160 persons" (Sri Ramana Kendram, 2005), has revised and updated his book by including an additional forty face-to-face meetings with Ramana.
Rajamani's paper is now included as one of the additional forty face-to-face meetings with Ramana. It should be pointed out that the main point I cite and reference in my works as being inaccurate in Rajamani's presentation --- i.e., the boy's nationality --- has been mysteriously deleted and/or removed from the text, and done so most notably since the appearance of the Last American Darshan.
You can see for yourself the aforemention deletion or correction, as the case may be, in "real life" by going to the PDF online version of Laxmi Narain's book. Refer to Number 179, page 384, titled C.R. Rajamani
FACE TO FACE WITH SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI
Enchanting and Uplifting Reminiscences of 202 Persons
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
Footnote [2]
That would be the 67th International Convention held December 26 to 31, 1943 at the International Headquarters, Adyar, India.
Footnote [3]
It should be noted that in researching where the liferaft seen by the letter writer could have orginated, the name of the ship, Tulagi --- although an unusual name or word, and surely not in everybody's everyday vocabulary --- was not the first time I came across it. In an incredible coincidence the "word" Tulagi came up in conversation years before I ever even heard of the liferaft situation.
If you recall from the main text above, after returning from India and being left unannounced with my grandmother on my father's side in Pennsylvania for an unknown period of time, at least as my Uncle related it to me, I was returned to California to be with my grandmother on my mother's side. I was with her only a short time when I was fostered out to a couple that owned a flower shop. After awhile, not liking the arrangements for one reason or the other, I ran away from home without anybody knowing where I was or having anybody's consent to do so. I ended up staying with a recently discharged World War II ex-Marine taxi driver that had fought his way up through all the islands in all the major battles in the Pacific from Guadacanal northward.
Instead of going to school I would hang out in his taxi with him. Several days a week we would end up having breakfast at the Happy Hour Cafe owned by the infamous Fifie Malouf. Sometimes in the afternoons or evenings I would hang out in the cafe while the ex-marine "visited a friend" in one of the apartments attached to or nearby the cafe. As a young boy basically left unattended in the cafe every now and then, it wasn't long before some of the women who were associated with Fifie in some fashion, and who joined us for breakfast once in awhile or bought me a malt or a coke in the afternoon, befriended me.
I was sitting in the cafe with a couple of the women and the ex-marine taxi driver when another ex-marine who apparently knew one of the women, stepped up to our booth and invited himself to join us. It wasn't long before the two former marines discovered they both had been on Guadacanal and in the process began to dominate the once shared conversation with nothing but war stories. That is, until the self invited ex-marine interjected a story about an unusual situation he observed. In August 1942 he was on Tulagi Island, a short distance southwest of Guadalcanal when he and a bunch of other marines observed some sort of flying objects that were different than anything he had ever seen. He said they were round and nearly flat, shaped almost like an upside down pie plate tin, with no wings or fuselage, glistening with a silver sheen. With that one of the women butted in and told the ex-marine that was nothing because one night in February 1942 right there on the Strand a huge, giant object, as big as a locomotive, came in off the ocean and flew right over the top of the Happy Hour Cafe and the apartments. She had heard a ruckus going on outside, sirens, guns firing, all kinds of stuff, so she went out on to the Strand only to see this "thing" a few hundred feet above the beach slowly glide overhead off the ocean, not making a sound and, because of its length, taking forever to pass over. The two ex-marines just looked at each other and went back to telling their war stories. I knew the event she was talking about because I had seen the object myself. Not only did it apparently fly over the Happy Hour Cafe, it flew right over the top of my house as well. The object and the event, which was seen by thousands and survived over 1440 direct hits by anti-aircraft rounds before disappearing out over the Pacific someplace west of San Diego, has become known as UFO Over L.A.: The Battle of Los Angeles.
MY MERCHANT MARINE FRIEND
Footnote [4]
As I have stated, the letter that refers to the liferaft is not totally clear in what is presented and is as well, devoid of specific facts --- facts that could or would have been helpful in narrowing down the the sighting, inturn relating it exclusively with the Tulagi survivors. There is no ship name, departure date or arrival date. There is nothing said about it being a passenger ship only or a freighter carrying passengers. We can however, from general information create a route. The ship most likely left Bombay, India traveling to Cape Town, South Africa then to Liverpool, England (one of the letters was postmarked from Liverpool). Although nothing is said about the possibility of changing to another ship in Cape Town, then proceeding to Liverpool, it could have been done, with the original ship from Bombay continuing on to North America, South America or the Caribbean. If such was the case and the ship was hit crossing the Atlantic and sunk, and there were a number of vessels that could fit the bill during the time frame we are talking about here, then any official records of a sighting of a liferaft with a number of dead --- and their names --- would have gone down with the ship. It should be mentioned, although I did not bring it up in the Last American Darshan, that the letter did make reference to the South African port of Durban. It may be that the ship made it's main South African port of call at Durban rather than Cape Town, simply bypassing Cape Town on the way to Liverpool.
There are two online discussion forums, Ships Nostalgia and Mercantile Marine, that have a sort-of ongoing thread on the Tulagi. On both of them, one Prudence by name, seems to have a fairly good hook on the events surrounding the sinking and the drift, as well as being well received and respected by members of both lists. Prudence offers the following regarding the fate of the second lifeboat, albeit each with a somewhat different ending. The first would not meet my scenario, the second would. The question would be how would anybody know of the events of the first one, and of the second one, why did the survivors not come forward or ever show up anywhere?
"The story my mother was told was that the second raft came to a reef...They were all too weak to get over it into the lagoon and the sharks ate them...my mother had a breakdown and I have nightmares."
"There were survivors of the sinking who endured an epic voyage through gales with little food which ran out as did the water.. At first there were 15 who survived the sinking and these were divided onto two rafts. The personel on the second raft did not survive and drifted from sight on 19th May 1944. No one knows their eventual fate from the three surviving Burns Philip Officer's accounts. Searches of the Seychelles and the Chagos were conducted and some thought they may have eventually got to Madagascar."
Although Prudence receives no flack for either of her suggestions, there are those that have made it clear that they take more than a passing issue with mine. I would like to hear more regarding the "some thought they may have eventually got to Madagascar" part of the equation and who those some are and how they came to such a conclusion. It is quite possible that the second raft did indeed get as far as Madagascar, albeit without living survivors, ending up on some forelorn rocky beach only to battered to pieces by the sea leaving no traces of man nor wood. It is my belief that during the transit to that eventual fate the ship the letter writer was on came across the raft.
