The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

Hole-in-the-Wall Light is a hauntingly lovely isolated spot, the only building for dozens of miles on the southeast tip of Great Abaco. The motor yacht René, owned by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr, head of General Motors, ran aground nearby – they don’t know where – with the Duke of Duchess of Windsor during World War II. The in turn owned the motor yacht Gemini, believed to be still afloat. A very different kind of vessel, Onego Traveler was a European timber-carrier ship which lodged there in 2022, and appears destined to remain.

René was built in 1930 by Pusey and Jones, in Delaware. Her owner, Mr Sloan, purchased the 236ft fast floating palace for $1m. It was 34ft wide, 13.5ft deep, and made 14 knots with twin 1,100 bhp diesel engines. The yacht and Windsors were world famous: in mid-January 1941 they stirred up diplomatic waters when the Windsors joined the Sloans aboard René at Cat Cay, Bimini.

Against instructions from London, the impetuous former king flew over to Miami to watch an air show. Prime Minister Churchill wanted the Duke kept in the colony over which he was governor. Many in the Britain’s ruling class, including the royal family he had abandoned, did not trust the Duke.

In December, the Windsors visited Andros with Axel Wenner-Gren, owner of Electrolux and much of Paradise Island, aboard his yacht Southern Cross the largest in the world. They are said to have only taken the fateful voyage on René because their plans for a long trip to the US were thwarted, again by powers-that-be in London. President Roosevelt created several opportunities to have the Duke join him and glean intelligence or gossip.

On March 27, 1941, the Windsors, without their host Mr Sloan, set off on a tour of the Out Islands with Sergeant Holder and Senior Out Island Commissioner John Hughes. They voyaged to Whale Cay in the Berry Islands, San Salvador, Inagua, Crooked Island, Long Island, Cat Island, and Hope Town Abaco.

On their way to Grand Bahama, however on April 3rd René ran aground in rough weather in the early hours. According to an eye-witness, the Duchess’ private secretary, Jean D Hardcastle-Taylor (who appears to conflate the route), they were woken at 4.30 am to the sounds of the ship’s hull and propellers gnashing against reefs. She wrote in a later tell-all memoir that “The ship had gone off its course and we had missed the Hole-in-the-Wall Light. I guess too many shipboard experts had jumbled the proper course”. The Nassau harbour pilot was aboard, and the Duke told her that “we were lodged on a treacherous soft coral reef about 50 feet from the visible outline of the shore, and the surf is too violent for any possible landing attempt.”

The captain, who “looked ill with anxiety”, ordered the royal party into a ship’s launch commanded by one of René’s officers, initiating another dubious voyage. Loaded to the gunwales with two sailors, two government officials, two royals, three dogs, a valet, safes, files, and jewel cases, but not too much fuel, the boat set off in the wrong direction, presumably west, where the nearest village was Sandy Point. During a voyage of five and a half hours during which “an elderly native in a small rowboat …gave us directions to reverse our course”, and admittedly lost, they then passed René again “waving to those on board”. The eight people and three dogs finally landed at Cherokee Sound, and were later that day joined by René, allegedly in a harbour there, though even shallow mailboats are known to have had to anchor off and row ashore at the time.

Later that year, the US Navy requisitioned René, a week after Pearl Harbour, and she became USS Beryl. After conversion to a pilot boat in Seattle in 1947 the Maryland Pilots Association purchased her. Put to use as a pilot boat off Cape Henry, Virginia, from 1949 to 1977 as Baltimore, the vessel was ultimately scrapped in Camden, New Jersey, in the 1980s.

The Duke returned to Nassau to complain that just because he played 18 holes of golf a day, people thought he wasn’t working, and aircraft flying over Government House at night notwithstanding the raison d’être of the colony during the war was to deliver warplanes to Europe and the Middle East and train Allied pilots.

Not to be put off, the Windsors soon set off from Nassau to Miami aboard their private power yacht Gemini on April 17, 1941, and spent the weekend in Palm Beach at the Everglades Club. The wooden boat was used by their professional captain to take them to Florida and back and among the Bahamas during their tenure.

On one of their voyages, on June 27, 1943, their 83ft Coast Guard escort, USCG-83421 was cut in half and sunk by a US Navy 110ft escorting the cruiser USS Cincinnati, with all 13 sailors recovered. Gemini was said to have been a gift, possibly from Arthur Vining-Davis, head of Alcoa, and was named for the Duchess’ star sign.

Roughly 55ft long, Gemini was built in 1941 by Electric Launch Company, or Elko, and is believed to still be afloat. It is said the Duke and Duchess drank from glasses etched with Gemini and they were seen arguing in the state room. One sunrise in May of 1945 the couple fled the Bahamas in Gemini, quitting their third and final job weeks before the war concluded in Europe, and months before it ended in Japan. They carried Sydney Johnson, a Bahamian valet with them into self-imposed exile.

A stricken ship named Onego Traveler sought safety at Hole in the Wall Light in foul weather on Christmas Day 2022 while arriving from the North Atlantic into the Northeast Providence Channel with a full cargo. Built in the Netherlands in 2002, the ship was a geared bulk carrier capable of loading 9,000 tons. A German firm in Cuxhaven managed it. Flagged to Antigua and Barbuda, she began taking on water in her ballast system and tried to intentionally ground her on a sandy beach in southeastern Abaco. When this failed, “she sank in shallow water, leaving the tops of her cranes and her wheelhouse exposed”.

By December 29. the ship was stuck, and all her dozen crew were taken off prior to her sinking. The ship was en route from Finland to New Orleans full of steel products and a water treatment chemical, Ferix (ferric sulfate) in bulk quantities.

For engine fuel, she had heavy fuel oil and marine gas oil. The Bahamian government and environmental organisations stated that “fuel and ferix cargo have both been observed at the surface”.

Booms, a dive team to control leakage and a skimmer boat were sent. The Bahamas National Trust (BNT) initiated a meeting of the National Oil Spill Contingency Advisory Committee (NOSCAC). While visiting the nearby grave of Olaus Johansen, who was carried, dying past the light from where his ship OA Knudsen was sunk nearby by a German submarine, I spent some days in the vicinity of this casualty. The impression was of many assets committed to it, and yet the inevitable conclusion that a majority of this ship would remain. The Onego Traveler became another of countless vessels to fall victim to this critical turning point in navigating the North Atlantic.