Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean Read online

  He added that he was afraid that if he hoisted the sail in the morning, the lookout on any passing ship might have figured that he was just out for a pleasant sail and ignore him. Not having sails up also seemed peculiar to Murdock, as the first priority in that situation is to be seen, and a white sail is far more visible than a naked mast on a low-lying dinghy. Harvey also knew these waters well and was an experienced sailor, and would presumably have wanted to be heading toward a safe port somewhere. A sail also enables a craft to make way in the water, which, however slow the progress, is much more stable and less conducive to seasickness than simply wallowing in the waves.

  On the other hand, Murdock conceded, trying to make headway by raising sail in a dinghy towing the dead weight of a raft would be tantamount to the dinghy pulling a heavy sea anchor, meaning that a wind of any strength would tend to push the dinghy over rather than propel the tandem forward. So Harvey could have been right.

  Murdock: “Now, this carbide water light which you threw overboard, did you pull the plug on it?”

  Harvey: “I could see nothing to pull. I’d been told that all you do is put it in the water. I just threw it overboard.”

  Murdock looked stunned. This piece of equipment was simple to use and entirely familiar to most sailors of large seagoing craft. A carbide water light was a lamp with two chambers: an upper one that contained water, and a lower one that contained chunks of calcium carbide. Allowing water to drip slowly on the carbide produced the flammable gas acetylene, which burned brightly enough to be a standard seaborne emergency light until recent times as well as a much-used lamp for mining and spelunking. The seaborne carbide water light was ignited by a plunger with a steel head striking a flint and creating a spark.

  The plug mentioned by Murdock released the water onto the carbide, and was easy to see. Murdock looked at the experienced sailor and past owner of big sailboats, a highly experienced combat veteran skilled in how to keep his head in emergencies, and a skipper who was required to be schooled in the use of emergency, safety, and rescue equipment. Murdock was astonished that Harvey said he simply threw something as vital as the carbide emergency lamp overboard.

  “Captain,” he asked, “how much experience do you have in sailing a craft of this type?”

  Harvey sat upright and said, indignantly, “I have owned and operated craft of this type since 1954. I’ve sailed extensively in the Bahamas.”

  So Harvey, by his own account, was an experienced sailor. This made aspects of his story even more difficult to comprehend.

  Harvey went on to say that when the mast fell, he started the engine and turned into the wind with just enough forward speed to keep the Bluebelle from wallowing and hold her at a speed of three-quarters of a knot. He remained at the wheel just long enough to “tell the people to calm down” and then gave the wheel to Arthur Duperrault. The doctor was bleeding, he said, but the wounds were superficial and, “I knew he could hold it until I got back with the wire cutters.”

  Murdock: “Who else was bleeding besides the doctor?”

  Harvey: “My wife. I’m certain she was bleeding. I don’t remember if the others were bleeding, but they may have been.”

  Another Coast Guard lieutenant rose to ask Harvey if Duperrault, at the wheel, actually kept the Bluebelle into the wind after the fire broke out. If there were no fire, the young lieutenant said, this might have been good seamanship. At a time like this, however, it would have forced the flames back on Duperrault and his family and driven them into the sea. In other words, even the simplest instinct would lead one to turn the wheel away from the wind and flames.

  Harvey may not have known it, and, at the time, the Coast Guard evidently did not either, but Dr. Duperrault was no greenhorn sailor. As noted earlier, he had sailed craft of various sizes on Green Bay and Lake Michigan. He knew full well how to handle a sailboat, even a larger one. What’s more, he had gone through Navy training. And he had also proven himself more than once to be a very cool head in a crisis.

  “Yes,” Harvey said. “The others had moved aft, away from the fire, but the doctor held the vessel on the course I had given him until he abandoned it and went back (onto the fantail) to jump overboard with the others.”

  Harvey continued, saying that Terry Jo, Brian, and René were wearing life preservers, and there were two life rings on the ship’s rails aft. He said he believed the adults had grabbed these when they jumped. There were two other life rings on the rails forward and he threw them overboard, he said, hoping those in the water would find them.

  Murdock: “Was everyone awake at the time of the accident?”

  Harvey: “Everyone was awake. The little eleven-year-old girl was screaming. I tried to keep her quiet. She probably had a nightmare or something. She didn’t know what was going on. She woke up and wasn’t wildly hysterical but with a little bit of shock.”

  During the night, while he drifted with a dead body at his feet, Harvey said he could see the reflection of the Great Stirrup Cay light in the sky. When the Gulf Lion picked him up, he was only five miles from the lighthouse.

  A few more routine and technical questions were asked, and then Harvey was dismissed. The examiners called Harold Pegg to testify.

  Murdock told Harvey he could remain to hear Pegg’s testimony, and to cross-examine if any statements conflicted with his own story.

  A moment later, Captain Barber rushed into the hearing room with startling news.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Sea Waif

  While Harvey was telling his story to the Coast Guard three days after he had been rescued, and four days after the Bluebelle had last been seen, Nicolaos Spachidakis, second officer of the Greek freighter Captain Theo, was scanning the waters of the Northwest Providence Channel. The freighter was passing through the channel bound from Antwerp, Belgium, to Houston, Texas, and Spachidakis was on watch. From his post high up on the bridge, he could see several other ships scattered over the sea.

  By some odd chance, one of the thousands of tiny dancing whitecaps in the distance caught the officer’s eye. It didn’t seem to disappear like the others. For no particular reason, he continued to watch the tiny and unrecognizable speck, squinting through the sun’s bright glare. At first he discounted it as a piece of debris; then decided it must be a small fishing dinghy because he could just make out a small bump that might be a fisherman. Then he realized with a start that no tiny fishing dinghy could possibly be out that far. He summoned Captain Stylianos Coutsodontis to the bridge.

  When first sighted, the object was about a mile away off the starboard bow. As the ship drew closer, they were stunned to see that it was not a dinghy, but a small, white, oblong life float. Incredibly, sitting on it, alone in a vast emptiness of sea, was the last thing that could possibly be there: a beautiful, blonde-haired girl. She was looking up and waving feebly. They stared in stunned amazement, as if a female Moses had just been delivered up to them from the bulrushes. The sight challenged first perception, then comprehension. Where had she come from?

  The girl was reclining stiffly, leaning back on her arms, wearing pale pink pedal pushers and a white blouse, her feet dangling over the side of the float. One of the crewmen took a picture of her looking up from her tiny craft, squinting against the sun, dwarfed by the expanse of empty sea around her. Her bleached hair was glowing brightly in the sun above her emaciated and painfully drawn sunburned face. This picture would shortly be wired around the world, and front pages everywhere would proclaim the miracle of the “sea waif.” The picture was so powerful that it became a two-page spread in the next Life magazine: one page showing her on the raft, the other showing nothing but empty water. Ironically, it was printed in the very same issue that told of the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, the son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, in the sea off of New Guinea. He had been lost trying to swim ashore from a native canoe.

  The captain called out orders to stop the engines and to put a small raft over the side. He was afraid th
at if one the ship’s large and unwieldy lifeboats were used, it might hit the child’s light float and knock her overboard. The men quickly lashed some empty oil drums together and lowered the makeshift raft over the side.

  Suddenly, the captain shouted orders to hurry. Sharks, perhaps attracted by the commotion, or maybe they had been stalking her for who knew how long, were circling the little float and moving in closer to the girl’s dangling feet. Crew members crowded the rails and shouted to the girl not to jump.

  Evangelos Kantzilas, a crew member, quickly sculled the unwieldy craft over to the float and lifted the girl aboard. She fell limp in his arms. He pulled back alongside the ship. Another crewman at the bottom of a pilot ladder slipped a bowline under the child’s shoulders and she was hoisted, hanging limply on the rope, a couple of stories up to the deck.

  Her lips were puffy, her skin badly burned, her cheeks sunken, her hair bleached almost white by the tropical sun, and her eyes were dull and unseeing. A seaman lifted her and stood her on deck but her legs buckled. She was clearly severely dehydrated and in desperate shape. Coutsodontis picked her up gently and carried her to a spare cabin where she was placed in a bunk. Sea-hardened Greek sailors, with tears in their eyes, crossed themselves as they looked on, speechless. Moments later they tenderly gave her sips of water and fresh orange juice, gently sponged the salt from her fiery-red body with damp towels, and put Vaseline on her cracked lips.

  The captain tried to get her to talk, but she did not respond and her eyes gave no sign that she saw or heard him. He kept coaxing and pleading, but she was mostly comatose, and he feared she was too far gone – from what kind of an ordeal he could barely imagine.

  “Can’t you tell me your name and how you found yourself in the water?” he asked. “I want to report to the Coast Guard that we have found you. If you will tell me your name, I can send information to your relatives that you are still alive.”

  Finally, she shook her head weakly and gestured downward feebly with her thumb, indicating in the captain’s mind that she must be the sole survivor of some kind of disaster at sea that had claimed the rest of her family.

  “You can’t be sure they are lost,” he said. “Maybe some other ship saved them.”

  She shook her head weakly again, and again she pointed to the water. She seemed to be saying that she had seen them swallowed up by the sea. A single word, “Bluebelle,” barely rasped from her dry throat and through her swollen lips.

  “Do you have any relatives anywhere?” the captain asked.

  She nodded and he bent over as she whispered “yes” in his ear. She then managed to tell him hoarsely that her name was Terry Jo Duperrault and that she had relatives in Green Bay. Then she slipped back into unconsciousness.

  The Coast Guard had not specifically alerted Coutsodontis to be on the lookout for Bluebelle survivors, but he had overheard commercial news broadcast telling of Captain Harvey’s rescue. He had paid little attention to it, though he was aware that he was in the general vicinity where the Bluebelle disappeared.

  He telegraphed the Coast Guard in Miami: “Picked up blonde girl, brown eyes, from small white raft, suffering exposure and shock. Name Terry Jo Duperrault. Was on Bluebelle.” This was the electrifying news that had brought Captain Barber rushing into the hearing room. It was also news that overnight made Terry Jo Duperrault the most famous girl in the world.

  Even if it was uncertain, apart from Harvey’s not entirely credible account, what had happened to the Bluebelle and the Duperraults, it was now clear that Harvey was not the only survivor. Somehow Terry Jo had survived both whatever had befallen the sailboat and then four days without water in burning daytime sun and freezing nights, all the while somehow balancing herself on a life float that was about two-and-a-half feet by five feet – an oblong ring of canvas-covered cork with rope webbing in the middle that was designed to be held onto for a few hours by survivors in the water, not ridden on for days. (The Captain Theo did not retrieve the float, but the Coast Guard did find it a couple of days later. It had nearly fallen apart.) The float was, in fact, one that had been lashed forward on the cabin top of the Bluebelle. The veteran seamen of the Greek crew shook their heads in disbelief at the thought of what this young girl must have gone through.

  A reply came quickly, asking for further information on the girl’s condition, the position of the ship, and wind and sea conditions in the vicinity. Knowing exactly the location where Terry Jo was picked up in addition to that of Captain Harvey, the Coast Guard could now estimate more closely where the Bluebelle had gone down; they only needed to calculate the course on which the wind and currents would have set their crafts. This would give them a better idea where to look for debris and possible survivors, although they feared too many days may have passed. Coutsodontis replied that the girl was in a deep sleep and he hesitated to rouse her for a more thorough examination. He reported excellent weather and slight to moderate seas.

  More messages came, giving him medical instructions on the care of the child. He was then told that a helicopter would arrive at the vessel at 1340 hours and he was to have her ready for transport.

  The lumbering Coast Guard helicopter flew to the ship from Miami, hovered over the deck and lowered a basket, its rotor blades buffeting the air with noisy thuds. A burly crewman, blinking back tears, gently lifted Terry Jo and strapped her in, then gave the signal to hoist up. As the basket rose, she opened her eyes, managed a wan smile, and waved a weak goodbye to her saviors standing on the deck. The tough sailors waved back, still amazed by what they had seen. As the basket was drawn inside the noisy helicopter, she again dropped back to sleep.

  The Coast Guard quickly determined, once they had a sense of the generally westerly course Terry Jo had drifted on, that another Greek ship, Asian, must have passed close to Terry Jo’s float the previous midnight. An hour before the Captain Theo sighted her, another freighter also must have missed her by about five miles. Later, Terry Jo would relate that she did see the lights of ships at night, and other ships during the day.

  “You would not have been able to see the raft at a distance of more than a mile and a half at the most from my bridge, which was fifty feet above the water,” Coutsodontis said. “It was a miracle that we chanced to sight her.”

  But, perhaps if Harvey had forcefully insisted on a search at the time he was picked up by the Gulf Lion, she might have been found days earlier, for she must have been drifting no more than a mile or two east of him at the time. But, if things had happened as he said they did, she should have gone down with the Bluebelle. How did she come to be on that pathetic little cork float? Had she, in fact, somehow found one of the flotation devices Harvey had said he had thrown from the dying Bluebelle into the sea?

  At Mercy Hospital in Miami, Dr. Franklyn Verdon was waiting at the landing area when the helicopter arrived with Terry Jo. When he spoke loudly into her ear, she awoke just enough to mumble her name. Then she fell unconscious again and was oblivious to the throng of news media with cameras and flashbulbs that jostled behind her from the helicopter to the emergency room.

  Terry Jo being rushed from the helicopter into the hospital in Miami.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Warrior’s End

  “Oh, my God!” Harvey said when he heard the news of Terry Jo’s miraculous rescue, echoing words of surprise uttered by the others in the room. He pushed his chair back and looked down for a moment. Then he raised his head, looked around and said, “Isn’t that wonderful.” Others nodded, then went back to shaking their heads as they, too, processed the extraordinary news. Harvey got up, walked to a window overlooking busy Flagler Street, and stood there for some seconds staring out.

  The street below was filled with a mix of locals, newly arrived Cubans fleeing Castro’s revolution, and tourists easily identifiable by their loud sport shirts. Pigeons flew about in great clusters, and men with gravelly voices solicited customers for sightseeing buses. A block to the east, the royal palms of Biscayne Bo
ulevard waved in the soft trade wind that came in off the tumbling waters of the Gulf Stream.

  When Harvey turned back from the window, he headed toward the door without a word, seeming preoccupied.

  “Captain Harvey,” Murdock called, “don’t you want to remain for the rest of the testimony? You have that privilege.”

  Harvey shook his head, smiled briefly, nodded to the room, and departed. Murdock watched him go through narrowing eyelids. He and Captain Barber exchanged glances. Then they huddled. Within minutes a telephone call went out to the Miami Police Department.

  The Coast Guard officers asked that a guard be placed outside Terry Jo’s hospital room. They had no specific reason for this move, but Harvey’s testimony had too many holes in it. They had no idea what he might have been hiding, if anything, and Terry Jo was the only person known to be alive who could corroborate or contradict his account of the Bluebelle’s fate.

  The day after Harvey walked out of the Coast Guard inquiry, shortly before the noon checkout time, a maid knocked on the door of Room 17 at the Sandman Motel on Miami’s busy Biscayne Boulevard. It was a hot day. Even though the street ran near the cool breezes of Biscayne Bay, the sun was baking the pavement. A stream of automobiles, bringing refugees from the first icy grip of a northern winter, rolled along the sunny boulevard. At the Sandman, guests splashed and laughed in the small swimming pool, or sunned themselves in deck chairs.

  When no one answered, the maid unlocked the door of the air-conditioned room. The cool air felt good to her skin. There was a slightly odd odor as she entered the room, but she thought little of it. She was used to the smells of tightly closed motel rooms.

  One of the twin beds was rumpled. As she pulled the sheets from it, she noticed a small splotch of blood on one of them. She went to the bathroom to collect the used towels, but couldn’t open the door. It wasn’t locked but something inside was blocking it, something large and soft seemed braced against it.