Lily Maiden

The long swells of the South Atlantic break angrily against lonely Tristan da Cunha. In the volcanic rock of this island group, halfway between Cape Town and Montevideo, they have scoured deep, dark caverns.

Far back in the recesses of one such cavern on Tristan Island, Arthur Repetto, brother of the island's headman, found a ship's figurehead. Its ghostlike glimmer "skeered" him at first. When he went in he found a beautifully modeled maiden, nine feet high. Her hair was done up in a bun behind her head; a long cloak, which her left hand grasped, covered her dress. Her right hand held a lily to her bosom. Around her neck was carved a necklace of disks; a tasseled cord girdled her waist. On each arm was a bracelet hung with draperies. The wood was well preserved, with few barnacles or seaweed, and traces of white, blue, green, gold and red paint glowed faintly. Rusty iron bolts showed where the figure had been fastened to a ship's bow. With the help of other islanders, Repetto brought the figurehead by boat to Tristan's settlement. There it was repainted, mounted at the base of the flagstaff.

Four years after Repetto found the maiden, a ship touched at Tristan, took back photographs to Cape Town. There a mechanic of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm identified it as the figurehead of the Admiral Karpfanger, which had once been laid up in his Liverpool shipyard.

The Admiral Karpf anger, a four-masted bark of 2,853 tons, put out from Port Germein,'South Australia, on Feb. 8, 1938. Aboard were 44 cadets and 16 officers and men of the Hamburg-America Line. Five weeks later she radioed her position from somewhere south of New Zealand and said she would round Cape Horn. That was the last ever heard of her until the lily maiden was found.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.