Once a week I get together with a group of other island artists to paint. Sometimes we paint notable San Juan islanders. In February 2008, two months before he passed away, Ramsey Milne sat for us, wearing his cricket blazer.  While we painted, he told us of his experience on a ship sunk by a Japanese submarine during the Second World War. I  painted Ramsey’s portrait and incorporated the gist of his tale into the background. This is what I wrote:

Ramsey is a raconteur.

A South African of British descent, during World War Two he was a naval cadet on a troop carrier in the geographic center of the Indian Ocean when his ship was torpedoed twice by a Japanese submarine. The submarine commander was compassionate. He allowed over one half hour between the  first and second strikes, allowing evacuation to begin. After the second torpedo, the ship went down in thirty-eight seconds, Many died, in waters that soon filled with sharks. Ramsey shared a pontoon with a young boy whose parents had been sucked down by the ship. He was inconsolable. The captain, who was on another pontoon, yelled across the water to Ramsey, “which way should we go?” It was something they joked about over the years. A search plane found them and Ramsey survived to see the Japanese bombardment of Calcutta. The commander of the Japanese submarine was himself later sunk by an American destroyer. Ramsey went on to become a journalist. He interviewed Jan Smuts and Desmond Tutu, moved to New York, then Greenwich Connecticut, where he was a member of the cricket squad, and finally to San Juan Island.

Two months later, Ramsey passed away.