01.08.71

A rapid fire knocking pierced my sleep this morning. Jonesy’s face was white if a black man could be white. He told me to come to the bridge. It was around 5:30 am and still inky. December near the equator took some getting used to. The waters were rolling and choppy, the wind cold. I made my way sleepily up the winding unstable stairs to find that Lincoln was sitting alert with his ears peeled and a brimming cup of steaming coffee that was about twenty minutes to hot for consumption. He always mumbled under his breath when he realized his foolishness. My cup was to the left, I walked over to it and sat in my chair and took a swig. I lit a cigarette and pulled myself into consciousness.

I was briefed with correspondence that was coming in sporadically over the last thirty minutes; a ship was going down fast and in my backyard. Shortly after a hissing came from the VHF, the messages came intermittently; a large boat was burning just North of Mustique between the Pillories. We were between Petit Martinique and Canaoun it would take us on a calm day at full speed about an hour. Jonesy and Lincoln looked at me eagerly for some sort of confirmation or an order. I was puzzled by this non-question. Barbados would have to wait.

The engine room thrust us ahead full blast. About 7:30 am the coast of Mustique came into full view. It was a beautiful pristine morning with darkness rising from the center of my vision. An endless cloud of smoke was pouring into the morning sky, flowing out of this immaculate white cruise liner. We dropped anchor behind the Pillories and deployed our life raft. The sea was littered with about thirty life rafts and the land with faces that were curious and animated. Hands waving like frantic flags in a sea of confusion. We pulled up alongside the largest raft and got a layman’s idea of what happened.

She ran into a reef, the fuel tanks exploded, she burnt. Captain Raymond Kerverdo read the ocean depth at 16 meters, my guess is that the maps were drawn up years ago and didn’t take into consideration that shallow areas of this sea behave antagonistic at times. In fact the depth was roughly half, eight meters. She had pushed off out of Margarita, Venezuela nine days before. The dawn of a new year, docked in Trinidad for a night and was heading up to Barbados with her mostly European crew and passengers.

The Caribbean was becoming a magnet for those who could afford it. The crew and I watched as boats from as far away as Martinique came to aid. We hoisted our anchors later that evening after all of the passengers were safe, they had been taken ashore by many saviors of the sea, most of them housed temporarily on Mustique at the Cotton House and the others between Bequia and the mainland.

The Antilles lay twisted on her side, burnt and broken. One thing about sea folk, on God’s water there is this ethos of being equal. Once you are in the vicinity of a disaster of this magnitude you have to force yourself to stop thinking too much about bad luck. In 1958 British aristocrat Colin Tennant had purchased the island of Mustique for a sum of money that is a shame, 45,000 pounds, Princess Margaret famously took up residence. Shortly thereafter the government in its servitude bent over backwards to secure itself in the Commonwealth and under the Queens skirt.

I never really understood why we left that evening so early. I would have loved to stay and watch her melt away. I watched the smoke recede against the horizon as we carried on our way to Barbados. We made it. She never did. I have since developed an obsession about this gentle iron giant resting on the banks of some kind reef. Some days later she was emptied of her brass, a boat going to Guyana was the kind recipient of the treasure. All the china was distributed between the more affluent families of the Grenadines. I would be lying to say that I didn’t have any or that I knew a kind house in Bequia that wasn’t laden with the luxurious “Made in France” platters, plates, glasses and pots.

After inhaling so much smoke from the belly of the ship it will be impossible to forget her, I could not fathom what it would be like to loose one of these gracious beasts to Mother Nature or stupidity. She turned into one of these crazy obsessions that only men with time on their hands would rip apart. Something oddly masochistic about obsessions they deter you and leave you feeing guilty and red faced, a combination of shame and excitement. Locked away from everything that once meant something to me, I started to put her back together, in my own crazy way, starting with her shining bell, the one that Ollivierre managed to steal before the sea called it to its grave. Real brass was just too heavy to swim with in deep water.