Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean Read online

  Hailed by an officer on the deck of the ship, the man calls out, “My name is Julian Harvey. I am master of the ketch Blue-belle.” Then he adds, “I have a dead baby here. I think her name is Terry Jo Duperrault.”

  This is the first inkling the world will have of the fate of the Bluebelle and the disappearance of the five members of the Duperrault family who had chartered her for a dream cruise through the Caribbean. In fact, the “dead baby” in the life raft will turn out to be seven-year-old René Duperrault. Her sister Terry Jo will be found days later and many miles away, clinging to life and to a small cork-and-canvas float. She is alive only because of her own determination, an eleven-year-old alone on the vast open sea.

  It had long been the dream of Arthur Duperrault to take his family sailing on the azure seas of the tropics. Looking out on the chill blue waters of Lake Michigan, the optometrist from Green Bay, Wisconsin, recalled the warmer waters to the far south that he had sailed during World War II, and spoke often of wanting to live for a year on a sailboat, cruising around the world from port to port, island to island. He had served in the Navy in the Pacific and had learned to love the sea. Even years after the war, with a busy career, a wife, and three children, he still held this dream.

  By 1961 he had become successful enough to fulfill that dream, at least in part. He knew he could afford to take his entire family of five on some kind of a sea cruise. Despite their comfortable life in a prototypical mid-century, middle-western city, he wanted to give his family something more, the gift of a glimpse of tropical paradise.

  That family included his wife Jean, his son Brian, then fourteen, and his two daughters, Terry Jo and René. That year, instead of facing a hard Wisconsin winter, they would head south to fulfill their father’s dream.

  Arthur Duperrault had always been a leader, and a success. He had been president of his senior high school class, the class of 1939, at Green Bay West High School, where he’d been a debate champion. After high school, he went on to Lawrence College (now Lawrence University) in Appleton, Wisconsin.

  With World War II underway, Duperrault dropped out of Lawrence in 1942 to join the Navy. At only five feet eight inches in height, and slight of build, he had to build himself up and gain weight before the Navy would accept him. Working out would become a life-long habit; in later years he was very concerned about keeping physically fit and spent some part of every day at the local YMCA.

  After basic training, Duperrault was assigned to the Far East, where he served as a medical corpsman on the recently built Burma Road, the supply line from the British colony of Burma to the interior of China during the Second Sino-Japanese war.

  It was on the voyage to Burma that this young man from the “frozen tundra” of Wisconsin found that he loved being on the ocean. The ocean is different from the “inland sea” that is Lake Michigan – the salt sea smells different from the fresh waters of that Great Lake, the fish that inhabit it are different, and Lake Michigan, even in summer, never warms to the temperatures of tropical waters. And the ocean goes on forever, whereas you are never more than a few hours from shore on even the largest of the Great Lakes.

  Arthur Duperrault spent long hours on the deck of his transport ship, leaning on the rail and staring into the far horizon. Once in Southeast Asia, he traveled with the allied forces chalking up long distances on rugged trails, by horseback and on foot, treating men for malaria and dysentery as well as for wounds incurred in deadly jungle fighting with the Japanese invaders. More than once, he found himself in mortal danger. Witnessing the horrors of war up close, he never failed to acquit himself well, as commendation letters from his superiors attested. Once, when allied forces linked up with Chinese troops in the jungle near the border with China, he had the opportunity to meet the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.

  After twenty months in the Far East, with the United States by then at war, Duperrault was assigned to duties in Washington, D.C. In February of 1943, he volunteered to go to China as a medic, serving there for most of that year. He was then assigned to the Pentagon in late 1944. While there, the quiet red-haired pharmacist’s mate met the dark-haired, vivacious Jean Brosh of Madison, Nebraska, who was working as a secretary at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. After the kind of quick courtship that became common during the war, they married in Washington in December of 1944, Arthur in his dress uniform and Jean in a dark, satiny dress (from their black-and-white wedding photo, one cannot tell its color).

  Duperrault was discharged in November 1945, and he returned with Jean to his home in Wisconsin. By 1947 he and Jean had started their family with son Brian. The family lived with Duperrault’s parents in De Pere, Wisconsin, just south of Green Bay, while Arthur commuted to the Northern Illinois College of Optometry. He drove south to Chicago for classes during the week and returned to spend weekends with his family until he graduated in 1949. He then returned to Green Bay to practice.

  Determined to build a good life and raise a family in security and abundance, he worked hard and became so highly regarded by his colleagues as a competent, innovative professional that he was soon a leader in the Wisconsin Optometry Association. He also prospered in his optometry practice because he had taken the risk of selling the latest vision product, the contact lens, and the gamble had paid off.

  Green Bay was a blue-collar city surrounded by dairy farms with a robust economy built on cheese manufacturing and the busy paper mills that lined the Fox River. It was a town where rugged German-, Belgian-, and Scandinavian-Americans made a good living in those mills. It had always been one of the better-known small cities in America, but not just for its remarkable work ethic and healthy economy. It happened to be the smallest city in the United States that had an NFL team, and the football team had won a string of NFL championships in the 1930s and one in 1944.

  Although the Green Bay Packers hadn’t done well for the past two decades, they had started to win again in 1959 and 1960 under their new coach, the no-nonsense if not-yet-legendary Vince Lombardi, who believed that winners were the guys who worked the hardest. A blue-collar team for a blue-collar town, by the fall of 1961 the Packers were racking up a string of wins. Soon, Green Bay would again be synonymous with toughness and grit, and with the little guy defeating the big guy.

  Terry Jo Duperrault, her older brother Brian, and younger sister René grew up in a white stucco house on an acre of wooded ground near the tenth green of the Shorewood Country Club just outside of Green Bay. Living on the east shore of the bay of Green Bay, the Duperraults were just a few miles northeast of the city. They lived not so much in a suburb as on the edge of the countryside, as there were many farms nearby and few other houses.

  Their father often spoke of his experiences during the war and of his dream to sail the seas. Both his wartime adventures and his sailing dreams were the stuff of many of the bedtime stories he told his children. He wanted them to appreciate adventure and realize that “travel is the best education.”

  With her dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, Jean Duperrault was attractive to the point of being stunning. She was slender and stylish, with an independent streak: she had two very close girlfriends with whom she went many places and attended a number of activities, unusual in an era when married women were expected to socialize as their husband’s appendages.

  An energetic homemaker who worked hard to make her family’s life both secure and beautiful, she was also an enthusiastic gardener. Her adventurous streak came out in her meal planning; serving her family exotic foods like pigs’ feet, avocados, and fried green tomatoes reflected that.

  Jean took art lessons and the artist in her turned their recreation room into an Asian room for entertaining. She decorated it with paintings and artifacts that Arthur had brought back from the Far East. Both she and her husband wanted their kids to know there was a big, wide world out there.

  The Duperraults were all athletic and loved the outdoors. Dr. Duperrault (“Doc” to many of his friends) and Brian won many father-son
golf matches at Shorewood. Jean, too, was an avid golfer. She would sometimes stay behind to play golf with her girlfriends in the summer while her husband took the children to the beach. She was good enough at the sport to win the club’s Vice President’s Golf Cup in 1960; her enthusiasm for it was reflected in the fact that she was elected president of the Shorewood Club’s women’s organization.

  Doc developed a love for handball and soon became a highly ranked player, winning thirty trophies in state competitions. In early 1961, paired with a good friend, he won the state handball doubles championship.

  Arthur and Jean Duperrault were not just living the post war good life, they were solid citizens firmly ensconced in the American middle class. They were both active in civic, school, and church affairs, attending the small Presbyterian church in nearby Wequiock. Doc won a YMCA leadership plaque as the top layman volunteer in the Y’s physical fitness program. He served a term as president of the Green Bay Jaycees and earned recognition as a national leader of a Jaycee program to support shut-ins. And for six years, he was the volunteer clerk of the Wequiock Elementary School, just north of their house, which the children attended. Dr. Duperrault was fit and athletic and meticulous about his appearance. He had wavy red hair and blue-grey eyes, and wore a suit to work every day. His shoes were always highly polished. A very sober man, it was difficult to get a smile out of him. Clearly he took his responsibilities seriously.

  Having survived the terrors of the Burmese jungles, he was no stranger to risk and danger. He once received national publicity when he spent hours digging out the family collie, Ching, who had fallen into a ten-foot-deep trench. He won local attention on another occasion when he dived, fully clothed, into the cold waters of Green Bay to rescue the daughter of a good friend who had slipped through a life ring.

  As hard-working, strong, and capable as Doc Duperrault was, he also was an involved and caring father. He was often the one who nursed the childhood cases of poison ivy, sunburn, and the flu. When Terry Jo came down with the flu and slept on the couch, which she often did when she was little, it was her father who made her tea as soon as he got home from work. But Doc Duperrault wasn’t the only one good in emergencies.

  Jean, the farm girl from Nebraska, was, too. Twice when her tomboy daughter Terry Jo injured herself and needed stitches, Jean stitched the cuts herself. She also drove a neighbor to the hospital on treacherous roads during one of the roaring blizzards for which northern Wisconsin is still famous.

  And Doc was an avid sailor, especially experienced at iceboat sailing during the frigid Wisconsin winters. This was a risky, unforgiving, high-speed sport that demanded great skill. The boats often reach fifty or sixty miles per hour, and sailors wore very little crash protection. Dr. Duperrault also had several friends who owned sailboats large enough for extended sailing excursions in summer, and he learned how to sail these larger sailing craft on such trips. He also sailed small Lightning sailboats on the bay with his children and friends.

  Brian, the oldest Duperrault child, was, at fourteen, a freshman at Preble High School in Green Bay. He was small for his age – Terry Jo was taller than her older brother – and other children had taken to calling him “Shrimp.” He took offense at that, so he attended judo classes at the YMCA and, like his father, was very muscular for his size. Brian was outgoing and loved to play baseball as well as golf.

  Except for his blue eyes, Brian resembled his mother’s side of the family – and played the piano, clearly having inherited his mother’s musical talent. Jean Duperrault was an accomplished harmonica player. He was also, like his mother, quite artistic. Some of his drawings won ribbons at the local fairs. But Brian also loved to build things and spent hours in the woodshed next to the house that doubled as a workshop. He built a go-cart that all of his cousins enjoyed, and engaged in chemistry experiments that often caused small explosions.

  Seven-year-old René, unlike her two blonde siblings, had dark brown eyes and brown wavy hair. She was very feminine, preferring to wear dresses rather than play clothes. She was a quiet child, and always shy, even with family members. Even at her young age, René already had all of her adult teeth. Unfailingly good-natured, she seemed always to have a smile. She loved her dolls, playing dress up, and playing with the neighbor children. Her happiness was one barometer of how secure and loved all of the Duperrault children felt.

  From left, Brian, Jean, Arthur and René Duperrault

  Terry Jo, the middle child and older daughter, was tall and slim and, like her little sister, quiet. At age eleven she was two or three inches taller than her brother, who was physically a carbon copy of his slightly built father. Like everybody else in the family, she was a strong swimmer, and she also liked ice skating, water skiing, and horseback riding. She did not particularly enjoy social and group activities and was content to be the loner in the family.

  Unlike the rest of the family (except for René), she couldn’t stand golf, and preferred to stay home to watch her little sister or play by herself rather than getting out on the golf course. In summer she was always a tanned and sun-bleached platinum blonde. She found time to do a lot of reading and had a B average in sixth grade at Wequiock Elementary School. She also spent summers on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Nebraska, riding horses and helping tend the animals, especially calves and baby pigs.

  Terry Jo loved animals and kept several rabbits, two dogs, and five cats at home. She was constantly bringing home stray dogs and other wild creatures. These included a wild dog named Sandy that no one else in the family could get near. She started a pet cemetery and planted flowers on the graves of her deceased pets.

  Terry Jo’s world was so secure that, like a lot of other middle-class kids in the 1950s, she had to invent her own adventures and had to pretend that real dangers existed. She loved to wander alone in the woods near her home and play dramatic jungle-survival games, building her own little forts in various secret places, stocking them with supplies. Her favorite spot was hidden in a space between bushes that was open only to the afternoon sun. She would seclude herself there in the late afternoons, enjoying feeling both adventurous and secure at the same time.

  She would pretend to hide from enemies who she would spy on from the thicket. (Usually the “enemies” were merely golfers on the next-door golf course.) Even though she played with Barbie dolls and had a large doll collection, her idol was Tarzan. She loved watching old Johnny Weissmuller movies on TV, so much so that she even made herself a Tarzan-inspired fur loincloth using skins of rabbits and squirrels that she had found dead in the woods, which she sewed onto an old bathing suit. She wore this as she prowled the woods on her secret jungle adventures and when she swung on vines in her own private jungle.

  By 1960 Doc realized that he had become so busy that he was losing contact with his children. He decided that if he didn’t take his family on that dream sailing cruise soon, it might never happen. The time had come. He had decided the family needed first to try out a brief sailing excursion to see how well they would adapt to the routine of sailing and to being together in the confined space of a sailboat. He subscribed to yachting magazines and read the ads of sailboat brokers. He collected an extensive file of yachts for sale, all of them large, ocean-going boats capable of extended cruises for a family of five. In the summer of 1961, he found someone to take over his optometry practice for a year.

  There was no problem getting the children out of school for at least the fall semester. Their teachers said they could study during the trip and should have no trouble keeping up with their classmates. Their mom would be their tutor. So they packed up their things and headed for Florida, caravanning in two station wagons, the larger one towing a small hardtop trailer that they could all sleep in during the trip.

  The plan was that they would spend at least the fall trying out life at sea, and extend the sabbatical to a whole year if all went well. The family actually had been to Florida for winter vacations twice before and loved it. They had all enj
oyed days at the beach, swimming in the surf, and fishing from piers. They had not, however, all sailed together.

  And so, after a brief stop at a trailer park on the Gulf Coast near Tampa, the Duperraults – planning to take a one-week “shakedown” cruise through the Bahamas – found their way to the Bluebelle, tied to a mooring in Fort Lauderdale’s Bahia Mar yacht basin.

  The Bluebelle was a ketch, a two-masted sailboat with a sixty-foot-tall mainmast toward the bow and a shorter forty-five foot mizzen mast toward the stern. Originally built as a racing yacht, the boat was long, low, and narrow. The combination of its simple linear design, low profile and white color made it elegant and sleek. Fully rigged, the Bluebelle usually carried three sails: a mizzen, a mainsail and a jib forward of the mainsail. On the Bluebelle the mizzen mast was right at the front of the large cockpit, which had benches along the sides for passenger seating. The steering wheel was at the rear of the cockpit.

  The boat was sixty feet long overall, or about forty-five feet at the waterline, and fifteen feet wide at its broadest point. In front of the eleven-foot-long cockpit was the twenty-one-foot-long cabin roof covering most of the interior of the boat and rising two feet above the deck. Normally the ship’s white wooden dinghy and black rubber life raft were stowed along the left side of the cabin roof, and a white five-man cork life float was lashed to the right forward cabin roof. On either side of the cabin were walkways that were not quite two feet wide and were bordered at the deck edge by stanchions that held a cable safety line about thirty inches above the deck.

  The Bluebelle

  The largest area inside the boat was the thirteen-foot-long main cabin, finished in blonde wood and illuminated by three round portholes high up on either side and a skylight in the roof. The main cabin contained seating and a settee in the dining area that converted to a double berth along the left side. There was a small “head” with a shower and toilet in the right front corner, and a kitchenette along the right side. The main cabin was accessed from the cockpit through a companionway off to the right side of the mizzenmast. It led to steps down into the cabin.