The Third Mate's Story

Through eight days and 800 pages of testimony in Federal Court in Manhattan, a handsome, boyish Swedish merchant marine officer unemotionally went back and forth over the dozen minutes of his life that he would never forget nor be allowed to forget. On the night of July 25, Third Mate Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johannsen, 26, was in command of the bridge of the 12,500-ton Swedish liner Stockholm when she speared and sank the 29,000-ton Italian liner Andrea Doria. At stake, as he told his story, were not only legal claims totaling some $40 million but the still unanswered questions of blame in the great North Atlantic shipping tragedy (TIME, Aug. 6).

He took the watch on Stockholm's bridge at 8:30 p.m., said Carstens-Johannsen. About an hour later Captain H. G. Nordenson went below, leaving him in command to maintain a course of 87DEG. The speed was 18 or 19 knots, and the night, he testified, was clear, with good visibility and a full view of the moon. As Stockholm sliced eastward from New York Harbor toward Nantucket lightship, he was bothered only by ocean currents that pulled the ship two or three miles northward off course, and by the need to keep a weather eye on the duty helmsman, who was sometimes "more interested in sur rounding things than in the compass."

"Patches of Fog." Shortly before 11 p.m. he picked up the pip of a ship on the bridge radarscope (he did not know it was Andrea Doria), about twelve miles off his port bow. Andrea Doria was at that point running a few miles south of the westbound lane of Track Charlie, an "informal" sea lane charted by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and generally followed by the big transatlantic liners of the U.S., Britain, France and Holland, but not necessarily by the Italians and the Swedes. Eastbound Stockholm was about 19 1/2 miles north of the eastbound lane of Charlie.

Carstens-Johannsen tracked the unidentified ship as she closed in thus from ten miles away:

He calculated that she would pass to port within half a mile to a mile of Stockholm. He did not see Andrea Doria's lights until she was less than two miles away. (At once the counsel for the Italian Line pounced: "What do you think obscured the lights?" Replied Carstens-Johannsen: "That's what I'm also wondering," and then he conceded that Andrea Doria might have been obscured by "patches of fog.") In any case, mindful of the captain's order not to pass within a mile of another ship, he ordered a sharp turn to starboard, thus pulling Stockholm about 22DEG to starboard:

As Stockholm was swinging to her new course, Carstens-Johannsen turned to answer a phone call from the crow's nest reporting the movements of the fast-approaching ship. When he came back out onto the port wing of the bridge, he saw the sight he would never forget. Before him in the dark Atlantic loomed the brightly lighted shape of a passenger liner, showing her starboard green running light, and moving fatally and majestically across Stockholm's path. "Hard starboard! Full astern!" The desperate orders rang out again in the sedate courtroom. "I saw there would come a collision," testified Carstens-Johannsen, still even-voiced, still calm. "It was a collision situation. I had to stop my ship." At 11:09 p.m. the ships collided, as he saw it, thus:

Lines of Battle. As the third mate's story went into its third week, and fresh relays of lawyers resumed the cross-questioning, the principal issues between Stockholm and Andrea Doria began to come clear. The Swedes insist that the night was clear; the Italians hold that it was "dark and foggy," hence, the captain should have been on the bridge, Stockholm should have cut her speed, posted extra watches and sounded fog warnings. The Swedes insist that the ships were steaming port-to-port, with ample room to pass; the Italians counter flatly that they were starboard-to-starboard, and that Stockholm veered to a collision course even as Carstens-Johannsen thought he was widening the gap.

This week Italian Captain Piero Calamai will take the stand to tell his side of the tragedy, in which some 1,670 lives were saved and 50 lost.

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