Birth in a Boat

The lifeboat was almost awash. As it rolled and pounded in the 15-foot swells, Desanka Mohorovicic began to feel the pangs. It was just ten hours since she and 23 others in the boat had pushed away from a torpedoed cargo-passenger ship somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Many of the company had been bruised and battered as they tumbled along the listing deck and slid down manropes into the lifeboat. The ship's surgeon, Dr. Leonard Hudson Conly, on whom Mrs. Mohorovicic now depended, had two broken ribs. Mrs. Mohorovicic herself had hurt her legs badly when she fell, carrying her two-year-old daughter Visna to the boat.

As the pangs grew sharper, the sailors rigged a piece of canvas across the center of the boat, against the breaking waves. In the darkness Dr. Conly fumbled with the meager equipment of the lifeboat's first-aid kit--hemostats, scissors, gauze, iodine, aspirin, all drenched in salt water. He had had no chance to grab his instruments before his ship went down.

Presently the other passengers heard the sharp slap and the tiny squall. Genially Dr. Conly asked one woman for her turban, and in it he wrapped the eight-pound boy. For another day Mrs. Mohorovicic kept her newborn baby warm by snuggling him inside her lifebelt. Then a rescue ship drew alongside. The newborn child was handed up to a startled seaman. No assistance was needed for sturdy, 28-year-old Desanka Mohorovicic. She clambered up the cargo net, took a shower before she turned in. Last week, in a Norfolk, Va. hospital, she was feeling fine, getting ready to join her husband, an attache of the Yugoslav Consulate in Manhattan. Said she in her uneasy English: "Everyone was good to me." Said gallant Dr. Conly: "A brave, lovely woman."

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