Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean Read online

  On Saturday morning, maneuvering the Bluebelle with its six-foot draft through rocks and reefs along the shallow banks, Harvey set course eight miles northwest to Gorda Cay, a tiny island with a small settlement and a beautiful white horseshoe beach in a picturesque harbor. Off the island, the Bluebelle party was observed trolling for game fish, the ketch moving steadily under power.

  Early Sunday, the Bluebelle was back at her anchorage off Sandy Point and the Harveys reappeared at the commissioner’s pink stucco office in the afternoon to fill out the forms for leaving the Bahamas and returning to the United States.

  Dene chatted with the commissioner’s wife and told her that another charter had been arranged and “we’ll be back before Christmas.” She volunteered to bring clothing and magazines for the locals on the next trip. The commissioner and his wife were impressed with her charm and cheerfulness. Harvey was jovial, and laughed and joked with his wife.

  On the beach, Dr. Duperrault talked with another local fisherman, Jimmy Wells. Doc told Wells about a huge shark that had been trailing the Bluebelle. Wells recalled that Doc said he had considered shooting at it with his rifle, but then thought better of it, although Brian had been excited about the idea. Duperrault invited Wells aboard the Bluebelle and the party gathered around Jimmy while he told stories of his fabulous Abaco Island. He told them of the terrific fishing and about the great, green jungle in the island’s interior where wild boars, dogs, and horses roamed. They were descended from domestic animals that escaped a century ago from a ship that had piled up on the reef. Over time they had turned wild and multiplied. There were even feral chickens that had learned to fly again and lived in the trees.

  “Everyone on the Bluebelle was nice and having a wonderful time,” the fisherman said afterward. “It was a happy ship.”

  The young fisherman was invited to remain for dinner and, with the others, ate chicken cacciatore and salad prepared by Mrs. Harvey in the galley. It was to be the last meal ever served on the Bluebelle.

  The next day the tanker Gulf Lion spotted the Bluebelle’s dinghy towing its rubber life raft. Strangely, it seemed to some that the man in the dinghy initially made no effort to signal them, but as the Gulf Lion turned and approached, he was seen waving. Harvey then identified himself and told them that he also had the body of little René on board, although he initially had misidentified her as Terry Jo.

  Harvey told the Gulf Lion crew that he was the sole survivor of a tragedy. In the middle of the previous night, a sudden squall had dismasted the boat, causing the mainmast to plunge down through the ship, holing the hull. The mainmast also pulled the mizzen mast down into the cockpit over the engine room. The damage was so extensive that gas lines in the engine room ruptured, causing the ship to erupt in flames as it slowly sank, a jumble of tangled rigging on its deck. Many of his passengers, who were in the cockpit, were injured in the violent collapse of the masts and rigging. Harvey said he had managed to clamber forward, launch the dinghy and raft, and dive overboard but that everyone else was trapped on board by tangled rigging and fire in the cockpit, or had jumped overboard into the night. After the boat sank he was only able to find René, the youngest daughter, floating face down in her lifejacket.

  The captain of the Gulf Lion immediately called the Coast Guard, pursuant to long-standing agreements with the then-British Bahamas, to report the loss of the Bluebelle, an American craft. The Coast Guard launched an extensive air and sea search for any survivors or remains of the lost ship, also apparently permitted by the agreement provided U.S. Coast Guard boats stayed outside of a three-mile area around the Bahamas.

  The Gulf Lion took Harvey to Nassau, the largest city in the Bahamas, which was about sixty miles to the south. Harvey, having been given $180 by the sympathetic crew of the Gulf Lion, flew back to Miami the following day. Upon arrival, Harvey also called the Coast Guard and was asked to appear two days later, on Thursday, November 16, for an inquiry into the loss of the Bluebelle and the death of presumably all on board.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Captain’s Tale

  At 9 a.m., November 16, Lieutenant Ernest L. Murdock convened what was to be a routine Coast Guard investigation into the loss of the Bluebelle. He and Coast Guard Captain Robert Barber were to be the chief investigating officers, although Barber was not present as the hearing began.

  Harvey seemed in good spirits when he walked into Murdock’s tiny fourth-floor office in the Calumet Building in the Miami business district, surprising to many since his wife was presumed dead and, as captain, he bore at least some responsibility for the apparent deaths of the entire Duperrault family. He was dressed neatly in a brown sports jacket, brown slacks, and a tan sports shirt.

  The handsome captain exchanged cordial greetings with Harold Pegg, the Bluebelle owner and his employer, and flashed a broad smile when he was introduced to others in the room.

  Before the interrogation began, Harvey pressed Murdock for news of the Coast Guard search for survivors and wreckage from the Bluebelle. He now seemed nervous, and his life-long stuttering problem that seemed to reappear under stress or fatigue was now evident, but Murdock considered this a “natural reaction to his ordeal.”

  The lieutenant telephoned the Search and Rescue branch of the Coast Guard and then informed Harvey that the search thus far had been entirely fruitless. No other survivors and, strangely, not one single trace of debris from the lost vessel had been sighted by searching planes and ships.

  Harvey exhaled heavily as he sat down in a straight-backed wooden chair at the corner of Murdock’s desk, while Pegg and his attorney took seats in the rear of the room. The young lieutenant, speaking softly, explained that the purpose of the inquiry was to determine the cause of the Bluebelle’s loss and whether any incompetence, misconduct, or law violations contributed to the disaster. Then he placed Harvey under oath and asked him to give his account of what happened. That account would be dutifully recorded in the official transcript of the hearing.

  “Do you want the full story?” Harvey asked.

  “Definitely,” Murdock replied.

  The officer leaned back in a swivel chair and scratched notes on a pad as Harvey began to explain. Unknown to many at this time, the Bluebelle incident was actually the third time in the past six years that Harvey had lost a ship. This time, however, he had lost his passengers, too, and he had a gripping tale to tell.

  The following is excerpted from Julian Harvey’s testimony.

  Harvey began by explaining that he and Dr. Duperrault had planned a two-day sail to cover the two hundred-mile route back to Florida, sailing both day and night with a couple of breaks of only a few hours.

  Harvey: “We set sail from Sandy Point on the east side of the Providence Channel shortly after dark Sunday night. It was our intention to stop for a few hours in the lee of Great Stirrup Cay, get three or four hours of sleep, then proceed to Great Isaac, anchor in the lee for a little more sleep, then reach Fort Lauderdale Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

  “When we left Sandy Point, the weather was good. There was a fresh breeze coming up, about fifteen knots. At night, I always travel with reduced canvas. I had the staysail up and the mainsail up. I did not have the mizzen or the flying jib up. Under this sail configuration, the Bluebelle could easily carry twenty-five or twenty-eight knots of wind without heeling over uncomfortably. She could carry more than that. In other words, that was a very safe, conservative sail plan.

  “There were a few small rain squalls in the area. We encountered one of them about halfway between Sandy Point and Great Stirrup Cay. Because it had been such pleasant sailing, with no power on, everyone was in the cockpit. It was a big, roomy cockpit. The children were there with some minor bedding and were napping.

  “Then this small squall hit us and a monstrous thing happened. In a twenty-knot wind, the mainmast failed one-fourth or one-third of the distance above the deck. It was not a failure of stays; it was a failure of the wood in the mainmast. A fifty-foot length
of the mainmast came hurtling straight down, piercing the deck like it was made of paper. It was just like a telegraph pole going straight down on the deck. It tore through the one-inch white pine of the deck and continued on down through the bottom of the hull. As it gained momentum, the stays from the mainmast to the mizzenmast gave a gigantic pull to the mizzen, breaking it in at least two places. The mizzenmast collapsed among us in the cockpit. This collapse of the entire rig reduced us to a bare hull wallowing in the sea.”

  A ketch like the Bluebelle has a taller mainmast forward toward the bow and a shorter mizzen mast aft. These masts are held upright and supported by strong cables that run from high up on the masts to the edges of the deck of the ship (shrouds). These support the masts laterally. There also are strong cables (stays) that run fore and aft from the mast tops to the bow and stern, and from one mast to another. These support the masts longitudinally.

  All of this interconnected rigging is under a great deal of tension, especially when under pressure from the wind, so a collapse of a mast could conceivably pull everything down, including the other mast. The sudden release of tension also could cause a violent whipping of cables that would tear at anything and anyone on the deck as well as at other parts of the rigging, causing splinters and the like to fly. All of that rigging, plus spars and huge, heavy pieces of the masts themselves, mean that a great tangle of heavy debris could indeed fall violently onto the deck.

  Harvey’s stutter was getting worse now. There were long pauses as his jaw quivered and he reached for words but found it difficult to say them. As he continued, he shifted in his chair and sometimes reached up to run sun-browned hands through his blond hair. It was clear that he was under great strain. That was understandable, considering what he had just gone through and that his wife was among those presumed dead, not to mention the entire Duperrault family.

  Harvey’s testimony continued:

  “Fortunately no one was hit directly by the falling mizzen, but my wife and Dr. Duperrault were cut on the legs by splinters.

  “I was steering at the time and I started the engine and left it at slow ahead to give us control. I briefly checked the wounded and told everybody to sit fast and not to panic, that I was going forward to get the cable cutters and get rid of all the cables around us. I ran forward, clearing my way through the debris, went below in the forecastle, and finally got the cutters.

  “Emerging from the forecastle forward, I saw that a fire had started in the cockpit area, and because the wind was down the deck, fore to aft, the six passengers were moving aft, away from the flames (onto the fantail, the small section of deck to the rear of the cockpit). I seem to remember them taking some of the boating cushions aft with them. The children already had on their life preservers.

  “As they were standing on the rear deck (the fantail, behind the cockpit), very close to the gasoline tanks (located under the rear deck), I was naturally in deadly fear of an explosion. I ran below, picking up two five-pound fire extinguishers.

  “The water was already a foot deep in the hold, coming through the hole made by the mainmast. The boat was wallowing and the water was rushing backwards and forwards, making it hard to maintain footing.”

  Back on deck, Harvey testified, flames were shooting up through vents in the cockpit from the engine room. They had enveloped the cockpit, then spread quickly across the deck, which had been freshly painted with highly flammable neoprene. He said he emptied the small extinguishers on the flames with little effect. Now the boat was beginning to sink, and he decided to launch the dinghy and rubber life raft that were stowed forward on the port side of the top of the main cabin.

  Harvey: “The passengers astern could see me doing this, and they apparently decided among themselves to jump overboard and wait for me to get the boat back to them rather than stand there facing the fire in that area. They had confidence in me. I cut the rail with the cable cutters, bent the stanchion, and managed to launch the loaded sailing dinghy without swamping it.

  “I could hear faint yells, although we were going into the wind and they were downwind of me.

  “I tied the raft and dinghy together and rowed to the stern. It was pitch dark and I could see nothing in the water. I had a carbide water light, but it didn’t work and I threw it overboard.”

  Harvey added that the Bluebelle was going down fast now and he said he shouted until he was hoarse, but no sounds came back to him out of the blackness of the night except the sounds of the wind and waves and rain. At last, he came upon little René but she was dead, floating, he said, face down in the water.

  Harvey: “By this time, the Bluebelle had gone down, very quietly. As she sank, the fire went out. There was never a huge general fire, just in the cockpit and stern areas.

  “I was so exhausted, it was all I could do to get the little girl up in the life boat. I tried artificial respiration on her.”

  Harvey was beginning to repeat many of his statements. Speaking of the discovery of René, he said, “I pulled the child’s body into the raft. I pulled her in. I did it myself.”

  And he stressed, over and over again, how exhausted he was because he had had to lower the dinghy and raft without aid.

  Murdock eyed him intently.

  Harvey: “The sea was building up. I tied the little girl’s body in the rubber raft. By myself. Then I must have stayed in the area two hours before giving up hope of finding the others. After that, we drifted until about six thirty in the morning. I still kept shouting.

  “It was cold. At daylight, I opened the emergency rations. I could see that I was faced with a problem. The wind was from the southeast and I was afraid that I might drift into the Gulf Stream (roughly fifty miles west) and on north. So, from the first, I rationed the food.

  “The sun came out and warmed me up, but I was continually doused by the waves. The sea by that time was up in the neighborhood of eight-, nine-, or ten-foot combers, and the wind was a steady twenty knots. The tops were hissing.

  “About 1300 hours I saw a large steamer coming directly toward me, about five or six miles away. At three miles distance, it veered off to my left and missed me by at least a mile. However, I was told that one man on the stern saw me. They turned, came back alongside and picked me up.

  “They fed me and treated me for mild shock, radioed the Coast Guard in Miami immediately, and proceeded to put me off at Nassau.”

  When Harvey had finished, Murdock sat for some time staring at the ceiling, his expression stony. Some things didn’t add up. He found Harvey’s twice saying that he did things “by myself” to be odd. If he was so obviously all alone, why did he keep adding unnecessary emphasis to that fact? Murdock wondered if Harvey was trying to cover for somehow having contributed to the deaths of his passengers through negligence. But, perhaps, he was just feeling guilty because, as skipper, he was responsible for his passengers’ safety.

  The serious, black-haired lieutenant also wondered how a mast could pierce a deck as Harvey said it did. In his experience, broken masts didn’t plunge straight down. Pushed by the wind that broke them, they tumbled over the side, carrying the shrouds and stays with them. It also was strange that when the fire broke out, the passengers stayed aft when they might have been able to struggle forward, just as Harvey had done.

  Also, if the Bluebelle had caught fire, as Harvey said, why didn’t the lookout on the eighty-one-foot-high Great Stirrup Cay lighthouse, only a few miles away, spot the blaze on a dark night? And why didn’t Harvey, supposedly an experienced seaman, once in the dinghy hoist sail and take the dinghy to the nearest island such as Great Stirrup Cay, only a few miles to the southwest, instead of sitting there worrying about whether he would drift into the Gulf Stream, and whether his food would run out? A southeasterly wind would have been a very fair wind for making it to the southwest and Great Stirrup Cay with its light to guide him. Instead it seemed that he had traveled due west.

  Yet, there was no evidence to counter his story, and no known reason to be s
uspicious of someone reputed to be as reliable as war hero Julian Harvey. All that stood on the negative side of the ledger was that Captain Barber was personally aware of a previous incident where Harvey had lost another ship, but it had been judged to be an accident, not Harvey’s fault, and no lives had been lost.

  Finally, Murdock turned to Harvey and began his interrogation. First, he asked if Harvey had attempted to call for help by radio.

  “When the mainmast went, it took the antenna,” Harvey replied.

  Murdock: “You made no attempt to use the radio?”

  Harvey: “I knew it wouldn’t work. I didn’t even attempt it. It would have been a waste of time.”

  Murdock: “Didn’t you have any flares?”

  Harvey: “I did have flares in the emergency kit in the raft, but they were way down in the kit and they weren’t easily available. Frankly, I didn’t think of them at the time.”

  The fact that Harvey didn’t dig for the flares in such a desperate situation and, further, that he “didn’t think of them” was flabbergasting to Murdock. Everyone knows about flares. Even the greenest sailor would quickly think of them and find the energy to poke around in a bag, much like a homeowner seeing a grassfire would think of his garden hose and grab it, even though he was not a trained firefighter. Murdock found Harvey’s explanation preposterous. And yet there was no evidence of anything sinister. And Harvey had just survived something extraordinarily trying, even for a war veteran.

  When Murdock asked why he had not hoisted the sail on the dinghy, Harvey explained, “The wind was too strong and I was too exhausted during the night. In the morning it would have been swamped because I was towing the life raft. The dinghy (by itself) could have done fairly well, but with something in tow it would have gone under or over, the wind was so strong.”