Project Gutenberg 2025-06-23 Public domain in the USA. 130 Larrouy, Maurice 1882 1939 Y. Milan, René Milan, Rene L'odyssée d'un transport torpillé. English The odyssey of a torpedoed tramp $aLondon :$bConstable and Company Ltd., $c1918. deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "The odyssey of a torpedoed tramp" by Maurice Larrouy is an epistolary maritime war novel written in the early 20th century. It follows a French merchant steamer, the Pamir, and its young officer narrator under the gruff, resourceful Captain Fourgues as they haul coal, troops, and supplies through World War I hazards. The tale blends sea adventure with sharp, wry observations on naval strategy and bureaucracy from a merchant-marine vantage point. Readers drawn to gritty shipboard life, improvisation under pressure, and behind-the-lines wartime logistics will find it compelling. The opening of the story unfolds through letters that begin in August 1914: the Pamir leaves New Orleans with cotton, suffers a broken propeller shaft mid-Atlantic, and is halted by a British destroyer in the Irish Channel that announces war, prompting a swift turn back to France. The crew is stripped for the Navy, replaced by hapless reservists, and the ship is pushed from crisis to crisis—limping to Morocco without wireless, begging coal, and even ferrying German civilians and their furniture (with a farcical piano disaster) before being chartered as a naval collier. Coaling cruisers and destroyers near the Ionian islands brings mishaps (a glancing collision, a smashed lifeboat) and tart commentary on awkward procedures and strategy. Subsequent letters chart coal runs to West Africa, a risky night delivery of grain and stores to Antivari under air attack, and a scolding from battleship officers about gear the Pamir doesn’t have, all while mechanical troubles and lack of orders persist. The narrative then shifts to Alexandria, on to England to fuel the Grand Fleet (with pointed contrasts between British and French practices), a hurried Newcastle refit that the narrator manages alone, and finally a return to the Mediterranean with guns and shells bound for the Dardanelles. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/odysseyoftorpedo00larriala 20230605104536larrouy 1918 GB Reading ease score: 78.0 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. en World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction Epistolary fiction Tramp shipping -- Fiction PQ Text Category: Historical Novels Category: Adventure Category: Novels Category: French Literature 377777 2025-07-30T07:50:31.463312 text/html 353357 2025-06-23T11:36:48 text/html 353099 2025-07-30T07:50:37.426284 application/epub+zip 356508 2025-07-30T07:50:32.920306 application/epub+zip 356508 2025-07-30T07:50:32.062349 application/epub+zip 1106666 2025-07-30T07:50:40.870288 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1079433 2025-07-30T07:50:36.817292 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 345241 2025-07-30T07:50:30.782359 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 325323 2025-06-23T11:36:48 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 14807 2025-07-30T07:50:41.012273 application/rdf+xml 25764 2025-07-30T07:50:32.307338 image/jpeg 3145 2025-07-30T07:50:32.165305 image/jpeg 924428 2025-07-30T07:50:31.507352 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia fr.wikipedia