The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

In 1921, Roland Theodore Symonette, whose second wife was named Thelma, purchased a lovely, large and fast yacht and renamed her Thelma Phoebe. Later the first Premier of The Bahamas, Sir Roland (Pop) was an expert at maximising return on vessels. This one was built in 1908 as Galatea by Charles L Seabury in New York, then renamed Ungava and Onward, and acquired by the Navy in 1917.

Commissioned USS Onward (SP 311) at Norfolk, she was sold in April 1921 to Symonette, who operated it as captain from Nassau to the P&O Dock in Miami. She was 140ft long, 98 tons, 17ft 5in wide, and 6ft 2in deep, built of steel, and powered by a single steam engine of 464 hp. Onward was registered to Nassau on March 13, 1922.

In October, 1922, during the US Prohibition, her British-Bahamian skipper was called out for “causing trouble recently by defying customs officials on one of the dry boats in Miami.” She soon had “her named changed to Thelma Phoebe, and was repainted”.

She left Miami for Nassau with building material and several tons of tile “to be used in the construction of Captain Roland Symonette’s $30,000 residence. On March 20, 1923, a month before she sank, bustling Bahamian ship agents Albury and Co in Miami were preparing to load the ship with freight and passengers.

On April 29, 1923, a massive storm deluged the US east coast with torrential rains and powerful winds. That night, seven ships in the vicinity of Long Island, New York were wrecked, including the Thelma Phoebe, which was 15 miles off of Montauk when a giant wave snapped her rudder.

Unable to control their floundering vessel, her crew of eight Bahamians spent a terrifying night being tossed about in the dark. Just after daybreak on April 30, she struck rocks off the south coast of Fishers Island, New York, at Chocomount Beach in the entrance to Long Island Sound so known for its tidal rips that it’s called The Race.

As the ship began to break up and sink, the cook, Isaac Roberts, grabbed a mattress and dove into the angry water in an attempt to reach shore. Within seconds, however, he was swallowed up and carried under by the massive waves. He was the only crew who could not swim, and, probably not coincidentally, the only crew of color.

Captain Harold Johnson decided that drastic action was needed: tying one end of a long rope to the Thelma Phoebe’s mast, he slipped over the side and into the roiling sea. He dragged the waterlogged rope behind him as he fought the waves and struggled to shore.

On reaching the rocky beach, he secured the other end of the rope, enabling six stranded crew members to pull themselves, hand-over-hand, to safety. Isaac Roberts was missing. The Hartford newspapers headlined “Crowd grabs rum of wrecked vessel at Fishers Island, Survivors Tell Heroic Tale of Captain’s Daring Swim Through Raging Surf to Save Imperiled Crew of Helpless Yacht. Cook Loses Life in Shore Attempt”. A few days after the wreck, on May 2, 1923, Deputy Collector of Customs JC Comstock advised that officials had “ordered two divers to inspect the hull,” to see if it could be salvaged.

In March of 1979, Robert G Shanklin wrote a detailed study of the Thelma Phoebe and the local islanders’ responses to it. He was a well-qualified witness, and his father was half of the island’s officialdom, Rum Row was just 18 miles off South Beach, and the crate ashore from the wreck was labeled Peter Dawson, Scotch Whiskey.

His father “saw the vessel: a two-masted, single stack, black yacht was broached on a clump of rocks about a hundred feet from shore and was pounding badly in the surf. There appeared to be a triangle of storm strysail rigged to the mainmast aft. On the beach was a life raft and cases and bags of bottles of whisky were being washed up”.

Three miles away, at the Fishers Island Coast Guard station, Captain Peckham “was talking to a group of men wrapped in blankets who turned out to be survivors of the wreck”.

Symonette went to Fishers Island – something few shipowners do after a wreck - on May 10 to assist Chapman-Merritt-Scott in removing her diesel engine. As the owner of a shipyard which he would walk to at 4am, he was accustomed to this “difficult job, as the work of unfastening of the engine has to be done under water, and the deck must be broken through in order to hoist then engine from the boat into the lighter”. He was supported by marine salvage expert Dick Davidson; a master diver. He said the yacht was impaled on two large boulders, leaving a hole the size of a hogshead, but that the new 26-ton diesel engine could be salvaged, and it was.

Thelma Phoebe’s voyage was meant to be profitable, not painful. She left Nassau officially for Halifax, Canada, so US authorities were unable to prove that she was a rum runner with contraband cargo destined for the US. This meant that enforcers of Prohibition could neither lay charges nor seize the salvaged liquor, so Johnson, crew, and much of the cargo returned to Nassau. In fact, the US government enabled the shipment of 850 cases of salvaged whiskey to Kenneth Kelly Co of Nassau where it was almost certainly going to return to the US on a different vessel. By June of 1923 authorities were connecting the dots on various Nassau rum runners, such as the Mary Beatrice, whose crew included Bahamian William Johnson, “a brother of Harold Johnson, an alleged bootlegging vessel wrecked off New York”.

The crew were released as “no criminal charge can be brought. They were taken to BP Learned’s Hotel in New London, reported to British Consul Boston. The seized alcohol from Thelma Phoebe was stored at the Custom House on Bank Street in New London. Though at first “the body of Trace [sic] Roberts, negro cook, has not been recovered”, the day after [or of] the wreck, “Roberts’ body was discovered in the seaweed along the south shore. A coffin standing by in a truck bed for that purpose, was put into service and sent off to the ice house for examination. It was agreed that the cook was to be buried on the island and that it was ordered done immediately”.

Roberts’ unmarked grave at St John’s Cemetery No1 was revisited by a fellow Bahamian a century later, when museum director Pierce Rafferty located the exact site. The Henry L Ferguson Museum would like to install a headstone in Isaac’s memory in place of a blank white wooden cross but must first find a living family member. All of Thelma Phoebe crew were based in Nassau, and Isaac may have been as well. One prospect is Isaac Alva Roberts, born in Marsh Harbour on April 4, 1908, which would have made him just 15: either a very young cook or a relative of the dead man?

In 1946, Harold Baker found an unopened bottle of whiskey at the site Thelma Phoebe wrecked, and in 2021 I found a few relics on shore as well. Shanklin writes he was “never to hear anyone from the island say they actually salvaged a bottle”. Rather “all the stories ended in knowing smiles and winks.” Something perhaps those islanders might have in common with persons from the island from whence the whisky was sent…