Suicide
On 4 August 1919, Martha Washington departed New York City bound for Brest, France, on the first leg of a voyage that was ultimately to take her to Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire. On the evening of 10 August 1919, when Castle did not arrive at the scheduled time for dinner, his orderly and cabin steward found the door to the bathroom in his cabin locked. When repeated calls and knocking failed to arouse a response from within his cabin, the orderly and cabin steward summoned the ship's senior surgeon and a captain's mate, who forced the door. They found Castle dead on the floor of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had placed his wife's photograph inside his shirt over his heart and a picture of his two sons on the shelf in the bathroom opposite the mirror.
"During the voyage," Martha Washington's chronicler has written, "no unusual actions of the Commanding Officer caused anyone to suspect that he contemplated such an action and his death was a great shock to both his officers and men...Captain Castle was held in the highest esteem by the officers and men of this vessel, who sincerely mourn his death, with his bereaved family."
Read more about this topic: Guy W. S. Castle
Famous quotes containing the word suicide:
“Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)