The crew numbered fifty-four. The officers were British. The majority of the crew — the stewards, the cooks, the deckhands, the engine-room staff — were Chinese, recruited through the networks that connected Hainan and Guangdong to Ben Line’s employment system. Among them was Poon Lim, serving as Second Mess Steward.
His role was not a romantic seafaring position. The mess steward served the officers — managed their quarters, prepared and served their meals, attended to the domestic needs of the ship’s command structure. It was service work, defined by the hierarchy of the vessel, and it placed Poon Lim in consistent proximity to the British officers while keeping him in a subordinate social position within the ship’s structure. He was skilled at his work. He was also twenty-four years old, almost three years into a war that had already killed tens of thousands of merchant seamen, on a ship crossing one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth without an escort.
## November 23, 1942: The Torpedoes
At approximately 14:10 hours on November 23, 1942, at a position of approximately 0°30′ North, 38°45′ West — in the equatorial South Atlantic, roughly 750 miles east of the mouth of the Amazon River — U-172 fired two torpedoes at the Benlomond.
The German submarine U-172 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Carl Emmermann and was on its third war patrol, which had departed Lorient on August 19, 1942. U-172 was one of the most effective U-boats of the war: across six patrols, it would ultimately sink 26 merchant ships totaling 152,080 gross register tons, and it served in three wolf-pack formations — Eisbär, Unverzagt, and Seeräuber. November 1942 was a period of intense U-boat activity in the South Atlantic, where German submarines were exploiting the relative vulnerability of unescorted merchant traffic on routes that had not yet received the full protective infrastructure that was eventually deployed.