The Tribune

THE Imperial Light Service (ILS) built their final Bahamian lighthouse on Dixon’s Hill, San Salvador and lit it on April 1, 1887. The island is really just a 12 x 5-mile mountain top that plummets to 15,000 feet down into the ocean around it. The light is 160 feet above water and the tower is 113 feet tall, with a green flash twice every 10 seconds, visible 19 miles to sea. The light is protected from the waves, being set well inland on the east side of the island where navigator Christopher Columbus is thought to have landed in 1492. The plantation owners who are buried there--a couple named Dixon--are incorporated into the footprint.

A master mariner published a letter in the New York Times in the 1890s regarding the essential aspect of lighthouses to safe transit in the Bahamas, in which he pointed out recent wrecks of the Prinz Joachim at Atwood Cay, because of a 35-mile navigational error that resulted in the ship not being able to find the lighthouse at Watling Island (San Salvador).

Then there was the Antillian, a steamer that successfully picked up the Watling Light, despite its captain noting that “its power should be considerably increased.” He then pontificated about how mariners must navigate “the most dangerous waters in the Atlantic. … the low lying coral islands of the Bahamas, where outlying reefs show half-submerged remains of what was once a splendid argosy of the  sea – now an ugly, rusty mass of rotting steel.”

He speaks of how bad weather made it impossible for captains to obtain navigational sextant sights and locate their ships. Further, to combat the variable currents is the hard fact that with high speed and lights revolving every 90 seconds, a “15-knot steamer would make 2,280 feet between periods of revolution of this light.”

The British steamship Chancellor was wrecked on Hinchinbroke Rocks (called “conspicuous, isolated rocky masses”) on July 24, 1889. Two weeks later, a formal inquiry held into its total loss was held in Nassau for three days to decide the fate of Captain William Lynas. A Stipendiary and Circuit Magistrate named James Maclure Rae and Nautical Assessor Edward Scobell Clapp, Staff-Commander in the Royal Navy presided.

The Nassau Tribune of October, 1914 wrote of the British vessel Foxton Hall--carrying nitrate of sod--that blew up and caused the ship to sink in just 20 minutes near San Salvador. The Liverpool ship had recently flagged to the US for American Steel and loaded in Chile. When the skipper saw smoke coming from the cargo holds he and 23 other mariners boarded lifeboats and fled with nothing but the clothes they had on. A seaman and the chief engineer were lost and never found. Six Germans in the crew were accused of somehow sabotaging the ship and arrested. The rest went to Nassau then Miami on the ship Frances E. 

Late in 1918, the US-flagged steamer Yenrut of Philadelphia sank when its cargo of salt shifted and she rolled over. The survivors were adrift in open boats, half naked, for 62 hours without food or water. Captain H. Feser helped a dozen other survivors to land at San Salvador, where they were helped by locals. The men landed “two miles from the Watling Island lighthouse and were taken in charge, and transferred to the schooner Water Bird, which took them to Nassau and the US Consul Dowdy.”

The vessel was owned by Robert Nelson Musgrove of Nassau and was a schooner built in 1892, with a 20-tons burden. Once in Nassau, the men from the Yenrut became charity cases. Apparently the Yenrut had been carrying volatile war powders for the US Government between Cuba and Panama until switching to salt.

The August 1872 fire and sinking of the large passenger sidewheel steamer Bienville under Captain Maury happened mostly far out to sea – 70 miles from San Salvador. One headline read “Quelled Mutiny at Gun Point as Passenger Ship Blew Up.” The ship had 132 persons aboard, with a young quartermaster named Arthur Howland of New Bedford, when it blew up. Two lifeboats reached land. The ship caught fire after 4am between New York and Panama carrying kersosene and bullets. When  boats were ordered lowered, the coal shovellers stormed over the women and children passengers and Howland had to draw his pistol and fire it to restore order.

Once afloat, he asked women in his boat to volunteer their skirts for use as sails, and the first night two ships passed them without stopping. When they finally found a beach at San Salvador to land on, passengers panicked again and leapt out of the boat, causing nine more deaths by drowning. Despite not having footwear, they trudged to the lighthouse. Howland rolled under the keeper’s table and slept for 23 hours, having not slept for 45 hours while in command of the boat. A Captain A. Strahan led the payment of charitable funds for the survivors in Nassau, where they were “overwhelmed by hospitality.” Other boats had managed to make it to James Cistern in Eleuthera and were met with “spontaneous humanity” and housed in huts.

In total five boats made it to shore in the Bahamas, while one was lost. 

In 1891, a ship was spotted “bottom up” and drifting off San Salvador light by a passing British steamer named Nyassa under Captain Lormond. In July of 1914 the fruit steamer Limon arrived in Boston with a report of having seen the unidentified wreck of a ship just 20 miles northeast of San Salvador. From it projected a mast, extending 30 feet from the sea, suggesting it was a large schooner that had recently been overturned.

The same happened in 1926, when Captain Scott of La Perla said a derelict a three masted schooner “bottom up” was seen 200 miles north of San Salvador. The mariners could see 200 feet of the bottom of the ship, but they could not identify it – a hurricane had recently preceded this, and was expected to be the culprit.

In 1919, shortly after the war with Germany had ended, we learn that residents of San Salvador “thought shipwrecked sailors were Germans and wanted to kill them.” That’s apparently due to nobody telling islanders that the war was over until three months after it ended. Captain Beryn Bradford of the ill-fated schooner Nettie Shipman claimed that as he and five other shipwreck survivors tried to make their way ashore they were prevented from doing so by armed San Salvadorians who “thought they were Germans.”

When their lumber cargo from Jacksonville broke free and destroyed the vessel, the men grabbed what food they could and made for the boats, in which they languished for five or more days. Apparently on being told they were not German and that the war was over, all of them celebrated by opening tins of fruit. They joined a trading schooner named William B. Palmer and made their way to Nassau and New York.

In July of 1926, a British freighter named Port Kembla was on its way to New Zealand from the UK and Virginia when it ran aground on a reef ledge off San Salvador. Captain C. Vandenberg and 68 sailors made it ashore, where he enlisted the help of residents of the island to remove and salvage cargo, which included a substantial number of cases of champagne. During a complex salvage, assisted by a tug named Killeryig, the 11,600-ton ship (worth $4 million) was lost. There were cars, chemises, and much more in the cargo, destined for the fine shops of New Zealand. During the excitement, folks could be seen playing a piano on the beach and wearing lingerie type garment and holding Teddy bears from the eclectic cargo. Eventually SS Maravi, took the survivors to New York.

In 1934, the British steamer named Seven Seas Trader rounded Long Island and made for Crooked Island, when it had to be abandoned by its crew. A steamer named Ozda raced to the scene.

In 1969, solo sailor Captain Bill Verity of Fort Lauderdale, managed to use a makeshift rudder as an emergency tiller for three miles during an Atlantic Ocean crossing in a sailboat only 20 feet long. The voyage from Ireland to San Salvador Bahamas took 115 days, after which he planned to proceed to Nassau and then Florida. Ripley’s Believe it or Not found it noteworthy that the San Salvador light was still hand operated and lit by kerosene in 1978. Jocelyn Hanna was the nation’s only female keeper, and she wound the mechanism every two hours. In an interview, she noted that visitors take five minutes to climb the tower’s 83 steps.

In the summer of 1992, a group of boats, one called Global Warning and skippered by Roger Porter, sailed in the Atlantic 500 rally from Spain to San Salvador, 500 years after the Columbus landing. In July of 1891, the Standard-Times followed Walter Wellman as he traced Columbus’ route. Of San Salvador, Wellman wrote that there are “no floors in their huts, save the ground; no windows, excepting shutters; no wagons or carriages; not a store or place of business; neither doctors nor lawyers, and few wear shoes.”

All observe Sabbath, he noted, and roughly a dozen are literate. 

As for local government, Wellman said that “consists of one man,  Local Magistrate Nairn.” He is “monarch of all he surveys, inasmuch as he holds all the  offices in the island,” Wellman said. His will was law, and for 30 years he reigned there.

The Cunard Line investigated the grounding of their passenger liner of 22,600 tons, Carmania in the Bahamas in January, 1969. The ship hit a sandbar-topped reef near San Salvador, and the crew had to pump water from the bow and order a tug from Bermuda. Even though other inquiries had found that the Admiralty chart was inaccurate and showed over 120’ to 600’ of water there, the Cunard inquiry found “there was some error of judgement on the part of the acting master, Staff Captain Mortimer Hehir,” and he was demoted. They found his actions prior to and after the accident exemplary, however. All crew and 470 passengers were taken off by the liner Flavia after five days and taken to Miami, with Carmania freed from the reef and towed to Norfolk for repairs.