Zamzam

Zamzam is the name of a sacred well in Mecca. In 1933 an Egyptian shipping company bought the 24-year-old, 8,229-ton British passenger steamer British Exhibitor, renamed her Zamzam, redesigned one of her holds into a mosque with accommodations for 600, and set her to carrying Mohammedan pilgrims from Suez to Jidda, the port of Mecca.

Following an announcement by her owners last week that this strange old craft was long overdue at sea, Berlin announced this week that she had been "sunk by the German Navy"--probably by a surface raider--and that her passengers and crew were "safe and well cared for in German-occupied territory." Presumably the 322 passengers and crew had been landed at a French port. When and where the sinking occurred was not indicated.

World War II had cut into the pilgrim business, and the Zamzam was signed over to foreign trade. Last March she set out from eastern U.S. ports for Alexandria, by the long route to South America and around the Cape of Good Hope. "Although Egypt is not at war," said the Zamzam's Captain William Gray Smith, before sailing from Jersey City, "she is considered a nonbelligerent ally of England and we could not take any chances."

Any vessel on any sea laden with war materials for Britain's Armies takes her chances these days, and as the Zamzam pushed out into the South Atlantic her mosque was sacrilegiously jammed with fertilizer, trucks, automobiles and "machinery of various types." Her cabins were engaged by 202 passengers.

To the U.S. press, the loss of the Zamzam would have been just another statistic but for a sensational fact. Of her 201 passengers, 138 were U.S. citizens--an ambulance corps headed for service with the British in Egypt, missionaries going to their posts in central Africa, newspapermen bound for actual and potential theaters of war. Among those aboard had been Michael Kirchwey Clark, son of the Nation's Editor Freda Kirchwey; John W. Ryan; Philip Faversham, actor son of the late Actor WTilliam Faversham; Charles John Vincent Murphy, a veteran of the 1934 Byrd Antarctic expedition and an editor of FORTUNE and David Scherman, LIFE photographer who photographically pioneered U.S. bases in the Caribbean and scooped the world with views of Betty Carstairs' one-woman realm on Whale Cay, Bahamas.

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