The Tribune

By Eric Wiberg

Aside from the marque naval ships wrecked there, the small but strategically placed Samana Cay has claimed its share of wrecks on the current-laced passages to deeper seas it straddles.

Brittanica describes Samana as 22 miles northeast from Acklins Island, and ten miles by two miles at maximum. It resembles in shape a bat, flying secretly to our east. Arced by reefs, “the verdant cay has long been uninhabited, but figurines, pottery shards, and other artifacts discovered there in the mid-1980s have been ascribed to Lucayan Indians living on the cay about the time of Christopher Columbus’ voyages”. In 1986 the National Geographic Society, concluded after half a decade of hands-on testing that Samana Cay “was the site of Columbus’ first landfall in the New World”.

My only contacts with Samana have been small teams of adventurers who I observed and heard about having themselves dropped there by Acklins boatsmen for a period of days or weeks, after which they were picked up. Survivalists of sorts, as there is little manmade there at all, and no population, they live off the land. Having spent a few uncomfortable hours at the Acklins airport with these men, I can only say that they are not a talkative lot – not at all.

The motorship Patricia R foundered in 1972, west of Samana due to a shift in its cargo. Built in 1945, she was Nicaraguan ship and 710 tons. In 1970, the steamer Jorge struck a submerged object in the same channel and the 1946-built Cuban vessel of 7,273 tons sank. In 1948, also west of Samana Cay the British motor ship of 197 tons named Earles Transport sank there.

One of the more interesting survivors of Bahamian shipwreck who went on to learn a great deal of our ecology and write about it as well was Gilbert Klingel, author of a book named Inagua. On December 10, 1930, Klingel and his first mate Wally Coleman, both 20-something adventurers from Chesapeake Bay, struck the northeast tip of Great Inagua at Christophe Point at night. Their wooden 37’ yawl named Basilisk and modeled after Joshua Slocum’s Spray, quickly ground to bits as they saved enough of it for a temporary camp. Rescued and aided by solo wanderers – most memorably a woman named “Mary Darling, a self-sufficient woman” - in the Inagua bush, they learned a great deal about flora, fauna and politics of Inagua during a year-or-so stay. They left an enduring record of the island.

Other wrecks on Great Inagua included the 9,000-ton Eastern City, a motor ship owned by Leeds Shipping of Cardiff, Wales. She was en route from Vancouver to London when wrecked. In April of 1925, the ship Vincennes was under Captain Cumberland bound from Boston for St Croix, Virgin Islands, when she wrecked on an unnamed Bahamian rock.

Days later, a French ship in the Windward Bahamas wrecked with a cargo of 2,000 bags of coffee, of which 200 were salvaged. In June that year the 471-passenger, 450-crew liner Carmania went aground at San Salvador, and was salvaged in part by the tug Alice Moran. A British brigantine named Cynthia was en route from Glasgow to Mexico when it came to grief on a reef (misnamed Cayman) in the Bahamas, with the crew being rescued in February, 1867.

On December 15, 1849, the American brig William Davis carrying logwood wrecked on the French, or Plaaa Cays in transit from the Dominican Republic to Boston. Captain Cooke endured many open days of open boat voyaging once his ship and its cargo were destroyed. His men rowed to Samana Cay, remaining four days. Then to Fortune Island or Long Cay for two weeks, then they split up and rode different ships to New Orleans, leaving an ill first mate behind on Long Cay.

On December 6, 1884, the steamer Santo Domingo arrived in New York with 31 shipwrecked sailors. These unfortunates had been tossed ashore on French Cays, also known as the Carsoo Bank (not confirmed), a spit of sand, west of Turks Island and North of Haiti. They describe it as a 70-mile long sand bank barely beneath the surface, of which French Cays are the land portion. They struck despite the sea and wind being calm at the time.

By great coincidence the ships Spinaway and Invincible had very similar voyages, from departure from the UK to loading in Haiti and to load in Demerara, during which passage they “struck the same bank within an hour and ten miles of each other. Then the British barque Clara M Goodrich, of 626 tons also grounded not far apart. They had logwood from Demerara, British Guyana and Haiti for Rotterdam and northern Europe. Witnesses described how currents were running “strong and treacherous, and you are being carried along with them before you know it”. Because the ship keeled over and sank so quickly they rigged up a tent on the bank and with “plenty of food”, then remained five days.

Then wreckers “hove in sight and took us off”. Eventually whatever could be stripped and sold from Invinceable was taken to Turks Island where it fetched $2,400 in wrecking court. The men were taken there and released, making it to New York and eventually home to Europe and the UK. Even in rescue the sailors experienced unfomfortable and cramped conditions. In the wrecker ships on the voyage from French Cay to Turks Island they were 27 persons crammed aboard an 8-ton schooner, four of them badly sick with tropical diseases for three days. The 60-year-old seaman John Anderson died on the voyage. The mate added “the men suffered a great deal”.

In February 1949, an “SOS” distress signal was spotted on the eastern end of Plana Cays, which are uninhabited, by an Eastern Airlines flight. Since two passenger planes were lost in that vicinity at that time, aircraft from Guantanamo were sent to scour the area but nothing recent appeared, rather it was thought the message had been carved in the beach long before. A Tudor Aerial aircraft vanished between Bermuda and Jamaica with 20 people and 32 more lost between Puerto Rico and Miami; neither planes nor persons were ever found.