The Unsinkable Seaman
After losing his leg in a shipboard accident, an American sailor invents a wooden limb that keeps him working the high seas.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Alfred Rose, despite a wooden leg, is credited with being as handy a seaman as can be found on the Pacific. A sailor since boyhood, he did not know what to turn to when he lost his leg by accident four years ago. While on board ship, the hawser took a turn about his left leg. There was a great strain on the rope and in the twinkling of an eye the member was severed a few inches above the ankle. In a few months Rose was again on deck. The wooden leg is his own contrivance. By the aid of the large hook at the lower end, the iron pin below the knee and two small pins, one on either side of the leg halfway down, Rose goes aloft, furls sail and performs all the dangerous tasks generally required of an able seaman. He takes a back seat for none of his mates, and every master on whose ship he has worked in the last few years counts him so good a man that he is always in demand. Rose was paid off in this city recently and within 48 hours he signed again, this time on the British ship Dunmore, bound for Australia.
“He takes a back seat for none of his mates, and every master on whose ship he has worked in the last few years counts him so good a man that he is always in demand.”
In an era of industrial deathtraps, Rose’s self-engineered prosthesis turned a career-ending injury into a lifelong trade. His story reflects the grit of a waterfront workforce that was constantly negotiating the trade-off between physical risk and economic survival.
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