Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean Read online

  “This light, this is the one that is always lighted up on the mast when the boat is sailing at night. Is that the one?”

  “Yes.”

  The light that the lieutenant referred to is a masthead light designed to make the boat visible to other boats at night. Such a light is not designed to direct a lot of light down toward the deck. It is possible, therefore, that there was also a small floodlight attached near the top of the mast that pointed down toward the deck. Otherwise, there could not have been “a lot of light.” Many other boats like the Bluebelle would have had a pair of floodlights under the spreader that separates and tensions the shrouds high up on the mainmast to illuminate the deck at night. Also, it is clear that regardless of where the lights were located, if light was illuminating the deck from high on a mast, obviously the masts were intact.

  Captain Barber asked if she had seen a fire or evidence of fire on the boat. No, she said, but there was a strong odor like that of oil.

  “But you did not see any fire at any time, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you did not smell any smoke? You recognize the smell of smoke and fire, don’t you? You did not smell anything like a fire?”

  “No.”

  In reply to more questions, she told in greater detail of her second trip to the deck, of struggling with the life-float lashings, and of drifting away from the Bluebelle, not knowing if Harvey was out there in the dinghy in the direction she was being pushed by the waves. As she floated away in the quiet darkness, a brief shower passed over and large drops sparked phosphorescent flashes on the surface of the dark water.

  Terry Jo was getting tired and jittery. Dr. Verdon interrupted the interrogation and examined her. He indicated that the stress of the interview was causing her heart to beat erratically again and that she needed to rest quietly. She was still not out of the woods. He motioned to the investigators and they withdrew.

  Terry Jo’s story hit the second floor of Mercy Hospital like a hammer. It soon hit Miami and Green Bay and the country just as hard.

  Harvey had lied. There had been no accident.

  He had been no mere coward; there had most likely been murder committed aboard the Bluebelle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eternal Father

  “Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep,

  Its own appointed limits keep;

  Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

  For those in peril on the sea!”

  Eternal Father, Strong to Save (The Navy Hymn)

  No one knew at the time she was found how the “sea waif” came to be alone on the sea, and she would be in no condition to tell anyone for some days. Perhaps she had survived a disaster just as Harvey had described it and simply had floated away in the darkness, thanks to finding one of the floats Harvey himself said he had tossed overboard.

  As daunting as all of the unanswered questions were, imagining what Terry Jo had gone through in four days without food and water alone on the sea, broiling by day and then freezing by night, was even worse. Less than an hour before she came to be adrift on the float, she had been snug in her berth on her family’s too-good-to-be-true sailing cruise, as secure as any child anywhere who sleeps soundly surrounded by her loving family in a very peaceful place – and who sleeps knowing also that her family is, in turn, being shepherded by a brave war hero.

  Then the sudden unreality of death and horror and terror and a sinking ship, and the stunned and terrified child finds herself suddenly and utterly alone on the vast sea, supported by a puny oblong ring of cork and its frayed rope webbing. In an instant, her world has shrunk from the large encompassing security of the majestic and maternal Bluebelle that had embraced her family, to a few square feet of rope mesh bordered by canvas-wrapped cork.

  Paradoxically, her world has also expanded to the vast open sea on which she drifts and the endless open sky above her. She escaped a sudden death at the hands of the captain, and a slow death by drowning trapped below decks in a sinking boat, only to be vulnerable now to a slower death from dehydration, or to the horror of jaws striking from the dark depths. And no one in the universe knew she was there.

  In fact, Terry Jo was alone twice over; she was not only a solitary vulnerable speck on the ocean, she was an orphan. Unless her father and sister had somehow managed to escape and survive, she had no family.

  Terry Jo had no water, no food, no cover against the penetrating cold of the night or the blazing heat and scorching sun of the day. She was at the mercy of the indifferent sea. The pale quarter moon had set and heavy clouds scudding across the skies denied her even the small friendly light of the stars. She was all alone in a black void in which she could hear and feel but could not see. And, too, she knew that the terrifying Captain Harvey with his wild eye was out there, somewhere. She spent much of the night scrunched down and still, trying to hide from him. And she talked to God and asked for his protection. At first she didn’t even look up for fear that she might see something. All the while, the wind moaned in her ears like a ghost floating with her in the night.

  Now the sea of the Bahamas was no longer a thing of joy and beauty, as it had been during the idyllic first days of the voyage. It was vast, foreboding, and dark. Waves built up unseen and broke without warning over her tiny float, and she rubbed stinging salt water out of her eyes and licked the salt from her lips. A sudden tropical shower drenched her and she began to shiver uncontrollably, but some salt was washed from her face and lips and she managed to lick a few drops of brackish water.

  She had nothing to protect her from the chill of the night but a thin, white blouse and pink pedal pushers of light, tropical-weight cloth. Perhaps it was a blessing that she was in a state of shock from that night from hell, numbing her to some of the new terrors she faced.

  All through the night she huddled, fighting to cling to her life raft as it rose and fell on the swells of the sea. The webbed rope bottom of the float was two or three inches under the surface, so Terry Jo was always sitting in the water. But the water felt good on her skin at first because it was warmer than the chilling wind. She was afraid to move at all, stiff with fear and cold and shock. She tried to draw some small feeling of security from the webbing that held her away from the grasping, dark waters below, and from the thin rim of canvas-covered cork that was all that stood between her and the vast empty sea around her, and the captain with the wild eye. One thought began to occupy her: Where is my father? Maybe he got away somehow, too. Wishing for her father to be OK gradually became a prayer, and she began to talk to God and to ask His protection for her, her father, and her sister.

  Sometime later during the night, the skies cleared and she finally raised her head to see a great bowl of millions of bright stars overhead. They increased her feeling of the unreal vastness of this world of water and sky. She felt like she was in some kind of strange, cosmic dream, drifting alone through a dark infinity with nothing to hold onto but herself. She continued to talk to God, and to wrestle with confusion about what had happened. The small raft rose and fell, sailing on and on, carrying its little passenger. It seemed an eternity before the first weak light of dawn broke over the sea.

  A flood of light from the rising sun Monday morning dispelled some of the demons of the night, and her mind cleared somewhat. It was easier to feel real in the light, much as it was hard not to feel unreal in the vast dreamlike dark. But, if possible, the light made her more conscious of how alone and vulnerable she was. All of her senses told her so. But as she looked around, there was no sign of Captain Harvey. Feeling safer, a lot of her fear dissipated and, as vulnerable as she was, she said she never felt that afraid again. However, she did say that she continued to fear putting her feet in the water lest she would feel something bump them. Undoubtedly, her fear was blunted by the numbing effects of shock; but compared to the nightmare horrors of the Bluebelle and
the terrors and unreality of her first night adrift, her situation had – as strange as it is to say it – improved.

  All around her she could see nothing but a wasteland of water. She could only see a short distance because she was so close to the sea. Even when she sat up on the ring of the float, with her feet dangling in the water, her horizons were close. But when she did sit up, she found that the float was so light that it threatened to tip over if her weight was mostly on one side of it. It was not designed to be sat in, but rather held onto by people in the water.

  The morning sun’s warm rays felt good at first as they drove the chill from her slender body. But soon she realized that the sun brought her new and greater danger. As the day wore on, its heat became oppressive. On the shadeless sea, the air temperature quickly rose to 85 degrees. The scorching sun on her unprotected skin was much hotter. She found some relief from the heat by submerging as much of her body as possible in the water in the net, but as she did, one of the pieces of webbing broke. More would break as the days wore on.

  Unfortunately, the break exposed her even more to the sharp beaks of two parrot fish that had begun to peck away at her buttocks and legs, giving her starts of fear. They would stay with her constantly. Eventually she would get angry at them rather than afraid, showing her feisty side; she took a few angry swats at them, but she had the sense not to flail and make a commotion that could draw the attention of far more dangerous creatures from the deep. They certainly could see her from below silhouetted against the light of the sky. Interestingly, though, she did not feel much fear of creatures that might grab her from the deep, even though that might be everyone else’s nightmare.

  The sunlight glaring off the salty surface of the sea was murderous and the salt on her skin hastened the burning, much as the salt on her lips aggravated her thirst. Her light clothing offered her little protection, and she had no hat to cover her head, only a healthy mass of blonde hair, and it seemed that her brain was cooking. Her salty skin crawled and tightened painfully under the intense sun, and her face stung as the dry, burning skin drew taut.

  By mid-afternoon of the first day, body fluids were evaporating through her skin and with every breath. Exposure, dehydration, and heat exhaustion would soon begin to scramble her body chemistry.

  Far above, fleecy white clouds moved with the trade winds, but there was no rain in them. Even though she had not eaten and was becoming dehydrated, she felt no great hunger or thirst. This is true even though her tongue was becoming dry, her saliva thick, and her throat parched. Her body temperature was rising. The absence of both great fear, and hunger and thirst strongly suggest that Terry Jo remained in a strong state of shock. In a day or two she would be unconscious. In three this abandoned child would be dead, if she didn’t fall off the raft and drown before then. Or be taken by sharks.

  She had nothing but her own young and healthy body and grit to help her fight for her life. There was food in the sea around her, but she had no way to get it – except for clumps of Sargasso that floated by. She saw brown berries in the clumps and thought about eating them, but the idea of eating something salty did not appeal to her, so she didn’t. She needed water more desperately with each blistering hour. She did see a ship in the distance that afternoon of the first day, but it was too far away to notice her. She would see others pass her by, too.

  As the sun set, she briefly felt neither too hot nor too cold. But as the light began to fade, she felt again both the rising cold and the dread of the night. But she did fall asleep that Monday night. She dreamed of diving and swimming back home, only to awaken in sudden cold, choking panic to realize that she was in the sea. She had fallen off the life float. Fortunately, her left arm was still draped over the edge of the float, and she was able to pull herself back into the light and tippy craft. After she got back onto the float, trembling with fear, another piece of the webbing in the bottom broke.

  As she balanced herself across the edges of the float to take her weight off the webbing, she saw the light of a lighthouse, probably the one at Great Stirrup Cay, only eight or so miles southwest of where she would have been at that time in the Providence Channel – and where there would have been a snug anchorage for the Bluebelle and her family the night before. Strangely, she found that her sudden dip and its adrenaline surge had refreshed and reinvigorated her.

  Later that night – or perhaps it was the following night – she thought she heard waves crashing on rocks. It is extremely unlikely that she had drifted near enough to an island for this to have been true, considering that she was being pushed by a breeze from the southeast and a current heading west. More probably it was a hallucination or a dream.

  Several times during the second day planes flew overhead and she waved her arms. Most of them were high and flew straight. But one small, red plane in particular flew a back-and-forth grid pattern above her. Then it circled overhead. She watched it for a long time and waved at it, even removing and waving her blouse. At one point it dived down in her direction as if coming closer to investigate something. She waved frantically, her heart pounding with hope. But the plane passed directly over her, close enough that she could see the details of its underside, but at just the wrong angle for the pilots to look down and spot her. The plane climbed away and flew off. Terry Jo was crushed.

  She didn’t know that that very plane was searching for possible survivors of the Bluebelle. A search had been mounted that afternoon, right after Harvey had been picked up by the Gulf Lion. It included two aircraft and two Coast Guard cutters, plus alerts had been sent to ships in the area to be on the lookout. The official search area covered some 5,000 square miles of the Northwest Providence Channel between Grand Bahama Island to the north, Great Stirrup Cay to the south, Great Abaco Island to the east, and the Gulf Stream to the west. The problem for Terry Jo was that even from a plane at low altitude, her small white float (plus her blonde hair, white blouse, and pale pants) would have looked like just another little whitecap among millions of whitecaps tumbling over the blue surface of the sea. The only way she would have been spotted was if a plane had flown low and close enough for a pilot to see her by looking off to the side. And the only way a Coast Guard cutter would find her was if it happened to come very close. No ship had.

  Commercial planes flying from Florida to the Bahamas and back, and smaller aircraft plying the islands came and went. Each time engines faded in the distance, her spirits dropped a little lower, and again the only sounds around her were the slapping, grumbling noises of the waves.

  She was floating in the Northwest Providence Channel, a deep spot in a predominately shallow region. The channel is, in fact, the northernmost reach of an unusually deep trench called the Tongue of the Ocean. The seven hundred low-lying islands and cays of the Bahamas, stretching from near the Florida coast to a point just over the horizon from Haiti, are the exposed peaks of a great submarine mountain range. Terry Jo was drifting over a mile-deep canyon between mountains.

  In the shallow areas of the Bahamas, seas are gentle in the wintertime, but here in the deeps the waters grow mean in a moderate wind. A fifteen-knot wind out of the east pushed up swells eight feet tall, almost twice the height of the little rider on the inches-high raft.

  Prevailing winds affect the current of the channel, but the winds generally push toward the west-northwest in the same direction as the current, and gradually she was drifting in that direction. Terry Jo was moving inexorably to join the mighty Gulf Stream. If she was not rescued, her raft would drift on and on, first north with the Gulf Stream and then east, carrying her body in a great sweeping arc across the wide Atlantic to the British Isles, unless it was overturned by some angry wave, to drop her into the depths with the other ghosts of the Bluebelle.

  Fortunately, the second day on the float dawned cloudy and cooler. Several ships passed during the day, for the Providence Channel was a major shipping lane. Some seemed very distant, others closer. She even tried paddling toward a couple of them, but she ha
d the sense after awhile not to waste too much energy or to draw attention to her. The nearest island of Great Stirrup Cay was only a few miles south of her raft, but it might as well have been a thousand. The way she was headed, there was no chance that the southeasterly winds and the westward current would carry her to some friendly beach – unless the winds veered southerly or, even better, came from the southwest. That might have been enough to counteract the effects of the westward current and to deposit her on the long southern shore of Grand Bahama Island to her north. (That same shore was where later Lieutenant Murdock and Captain Barber would walk for days, looking for debris from the Bluebelle. None was ever found. This is likely because any debris would have drifted only slightly north of west, like Terry Jo, on a path that led to the Gulf Stream, and then north.)

  Terry Jo knew too well that sharks prowled the deep beneath her. Indeed, a couple of days earlier she had watched her brother, Brian, catch a barracuda, and she had seen the fin of a shark from the security of the Bluebelle. Yet, while floating, she remained mostly unafraid. Once, her raft drifted into a massive school of small fish that darkened the sea all around her. Sharks undoubtedly followed these schools, scooping them up in their great mouths. Fortunately for Terry Jo, the sharks must have been small ones – or well-fed. Barracuda were also there, and she had heard that they strike at colored objects. She worried that her pink pedal pushers might attract them through the web bottom of the float.

  In fact, Terry Jo might have been protected in a surprising way: the waist-deep water she had waded through in the cabin of the Bluebelle had been covered by a film of oil and gasoline, and because the boat was sinking slowly in calm seas, she had launched the float into an oil slick that would inevitably have formed around the boat in those conditions. The slight coating of oil on the float (and especially soaked up by the rope webbing and her clothing) might have been just enough to mask her odor from predators.