Clausen, Carl "Maiden Voyage."

A short story from the beginning days of the Second World War which clearly mirrors North American anxieties regarding foreign entanglement. A once-great liner, the fictitious GARGANTUAN (modeled after the real-life OLYMPIC or MAURETANIA?), is en route to scrapping abroad. Though her captain worries about German U-boats, it’s much closer to home that problems arise: a group of disaffected crew attempt to hijack the vessel in order to abort her scrapping. What they hope to do is to deliver the ship, clearly a valuable wartime asset, to an unidentified foreign power which, from Clausen’s writing, appears to be Germany herself. A ghost from the GARGANTUAN’s past (her disgraced first master) foils the plot by turning up as a stowaway and then, in a finale worthy of Götterdämmerung, the deranged old man sets fire to the ship rather than allow her to fall in “enemy” hands.