The Tribune

The Bahamian motor freighter Captain Roberts was built in 1941 by Earl and Gerald Johnson in Harbour Island and named for her owner Sir George Roberts’ father. Anne and Jim Lawlor write that “this was the third boat built for him in four years by Earl and Gerald Johnson…” The vessel went right into the international banana trade before being wrecked, salvaged, and entering the mailboat fleet. The boat was 98 tons, 111ft long, shallow draft, and was powered by a single Fairbanks Morse diesel engine. She had a sail when registered on August 1, 1944, to Nassau, and could carry at least 140 tons of cargo.

Her first captain, John Morell Carey of Abaco, was tragically missing and presumed drowned while seeking the lee of Andros during a hurricane in mid-September of 1945. He perished assuring the safety of those remaining on board, who clung to the rigging or spent three weeks foraging through mangroves to survive. And all of them did survive. Because the vessel was not equipped with a radio, the bridge team was not aware, for example, that The Boston Globe on 15 September warned that “Andros Island in Path” of an impending hurricane. The Associated Press warned readers that “winds of full hurricane force are expected during the night”.

In Nassau and Miami, the British military, issued a “Hurricane Alert: White and Blue Warnings, preparations made to evacuate,” on September 13. The following day, “airmen and permanent staff officers were evacuated to the Royal Victoria Hotel upon receipt of Red Warning”. Aircraft were dispatched to the US. In Miami, a PT-boat division commanded by Roger M Jones, later of Nassau, sought shelter in the Miami River. By September 15, the “all clear was received, personnel returned to their units”.

According to his grandsons John Carey and Robert Carey MD, Captain Carey “captained the mailboat Alice Mabel for decades. He did the Nassau-to-Exuma run, intermittent with the Nassau-to-Moore’s Island, Freeport, to West End run… the current dockmaster at Staniel Cay, Berke Rolle, was a small boy when he sailed on the Alice Mabel with Captain John”. Carey took Captain Roberts from Nassau to Haiti in early September 1945. There, “he got delayed one night getting into harbor in Port-au-Prince, due to some type of unrest in the harbour, till the next morning. They loaded, and he rounded Cay Lobos unaware of the Hurricane”. Once clear of the Windward Passage, the Bahamian banana boat headed northwest up the Old Bahama Channel, towards Florida deeply laden with 5,400 bunches of bananas.

“The weather was bad, and Captain John instructed his mate, Vernon Aubrey to “give them a wide berth” [avoid] Cay Lobos, as he did not want the men and boats to come out in that weather to try to trade. In retrospect, they were coming out to try to warn him of the hurricane. When the storm hit them, in the Florida Straits, he did the only thing he could do, which was to seek shelter to the lee of Andros. The boat foundered off of the Middle Bight [of Central West Andros]. The crew were saved below, but Captain John stayed in the pilot house, and must’ve been swept away. His body was never found. Vernon Aubrey, now deceased, gave the first-hand accounts of the voyage.

On 21 September the Miami News reported how “six Bahama sailors, who were rescued and brought to Miami after their small banana boat, the Captain Roberts, sank during the hurricane. [They] will leave tomorrow for their homes in Nassau. Three of the original crew of nine were swept into the sea…. The survivors were brought into Miami by another banana boat, the Jenkins Roberts, captained by Alphaeus Pinder [who said] the Roberts had no radio, and [their] only warning before the storm struck was two hours beforehand, when the barometer first started to go down.”

Captain Pinder said that “when the captain [Carey] realised that a storm was coming, he headed toward the safety of shallow water between Key Lobos and Andros Island. The small boat, tossed in mountainous waves, struck bottom about 28 miles from land: two hours later, she capsized in 18 feet of water. For some 20 hours after that, the men clung half-downed to masts and rigging. None of them had life preservers. On Sunday, the sea quieted down, leaving the pilot house above the surface, and the weary men climbed onto its roof.” Pinder said “They stayed there till Tuesday morning, when the Kismet, headed for Haiti, picked them up. They had been without water since Saturday, and had been living on green bananas floating up from the hold of the ship. They said the bananas tasted good.” The Kismet kept them until she sighted the Jenkins Roberts that afternoon, bound for Miami, where the men wanted to go, so they were transferred.

Demonstrating how horrific the hurricane was, Rose Mallory of the Miami News on September 17 reported on the tenacious survival of Captain AF Mende and his crew aboard the former 213-ton luxury yacht Nirvana, which was carrying a cargo of rum, cigars, and candy from Cuba. For 14 hours, they rode out the same hurricane between Andros and Florida. Mende related how “the only thing that saved us was getting into shallow water off the Bahamas Bank, where seas would not be so high. The ship fought out the blow in the hurricane flats, which they headed the ship toward when the barometer started dropping”. On arrival, they “ran the engines at full speed and kept the bow heading into the wind”. The Kansas City Star reported on the same day that “a sailor blown overboard and shipwrecked”. The 70-ton Honduran schooner named Icaros was on its way from Bahamas to Miami when the hurricane drove it ashore at North Miami Beach and pounded to pieces with the loss of one life, and six crew saved. Crew Cecil Wedeburn was killed while attempting to rescue a dog, and his body was brought ashore by his crewmates in a lifeboat.

The storm was estimated to have had winds of 150mph.

Weeks later, on October 5, two of the three crew missing from Captain Roberts and presumed dead somehow managed to survive the hurricane and shipwreck made it to an Andros community. The Miami Herald wrote how “two of three men washed overboard from their ship during the hurricane, and believed dead, turned up in an Andros Island village Wednesday night [3 October]. Engineer Alfred Bowe and Seaman Hartley Pinder of the banana boat Cap[tain] Roberts apparently wandered for nearly three weeks in uninhabited sections of Andros Island before reaching safety. Captain John Carey …has not been heard from [since] the hurricane sank it. They told their story upon reaching Miami.”

Captain Carey “had also piloted The Abaco, which took Abaco pine timber from Norman’s Castle to Miami and Havana, where the lumber was used to build the cities in the 1920s.” Still quite new, the Captain Roberts was salvaged and put into service on the mailboat run, rather than internationally. Hartley Pinder and Alfred Bowe were still aboard nearly two decades later, in 1961. An image of her struggling to dislodge from the sandbanks leaving Georgetown Exuma is dated later. One of her later owners is said to have been Edgar L Rolle of Lowes Sound, Andros. Captain Roberts’ final resting place is near Great Isaac Light north of Bimini, in 20ft of water, suggesting she may have been on her way to or from Nassau and Bimini or Florida when lost a final time.