Erroll Pilkington Gillespie Letters
Letters from from Erroll Pilkington Gillespie to his family. Learn more.
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Sunday April 21th 18
on board H.M.T. Scotian "somewhere on Atlantic"
My dear Father
Today being Sunday I thought I wouldn't do better than drop you a line & give you the latest up till now, so here goes -
We left Halifax about 4 pm Wednesday 17th & have been steaming along slowly ever since, this old boat is a pretty slow traveler, we only make about 12 knots, though I believe she can do 16 at a pinch, probably she could if there was a submarine after her! The speed of the whole convoy of course is regulated by the the slowest boat. There is one other slower than we, so you see our progress across is not very rapid, however as long as we get there in the end, that's the main thing. After we were about a day out from Halifax we joined a convoy of ships from New York, so that now we are quite a little fleet in ourselves, we are a dozen in number some pretty big boats in the convoy, the ones from N.Y. are all laden with U.S. troops. I have been having a good look at them through
BC Archives, MS-2685 Box 17 File 3 / OLIVER, William Edgar, 1867 – 1920. Victoria; lawyer. / Erroll P. Gillespie, correspondence outward, 1917 – 1919.