It Meant to Kill Us

By Richard Stengel

A rogue wind swallows a tall ship racing off Bermuda

He scratched the name Christopher in yellow chalk on the pavement at Bermuda's Royal Navy base. In red, next to this makeshift memorial, he wrote "Marques." A single yellow rose was placed beside the young boy's name and a bouquet of red and white carnations by that of the ship. Only then did Polish Captain Jan Sauer talk about how he and his schooner Zawisza Czarny rescued the survivors of the ill-fated Marques, the stately square-rigger that sank near Bermuda last week killing 17 sailors and trainees, their captain, Stuart Finlay, 42, and his 18-month-old son Christopher.

Built in Spain in 1917 and refurbished in England 13 years ago, thew 117-ft. Marques had appeared in several movies and portrayed the Beagle in the television series The Voyage of Charles Darwin. It was one of 39 ships competing in , the 800-mile Bermuda-Nova Scotia leg of the biennial Cutty Sark tall ships race sponsored by the British and American Sail Training Associations. One requirement of the race is that half of each ship's crew must be between the ages of 16 and 25. Finlay, an American who operated a sailing school in Antigua, had a complement of 28, including 13 from the U.S., seven from Britain, six from the Caribbean, one from Canada and one from Guyana.

Roiling seas and winds gusting to 40 knots buffeted the bark on its first night out of Bermuda, but when Andrew Freeman, 22, of Wallasey, England, finished his watch at 4 a.m., the fury had apparently subsided. "For some reason I stayed up on deck," he recalled later. "The boat was sailing along really well and fast, and it was a nice feeling to be up there." That decision probably saved his life. "Those below did not stand a chance," said Philip Sefton, 22, also from Britain, who was at the helm. He described the deathly blow that struck the Marques 80 miles north of Bermuda: "It was totally unexpected. It was incredible in its velocity. It was a freak hurricane. The ship was on its side in less than ten seconds. She started to go under in 30 seconds. The squall knocked the ship over like a day sailer." According to Mark Litchfield, one of the British owners of the Marques, who was in Bermuda, "it seems incredible that she was driven under like that. It would have to have been a wind of absolutely phenomenal proportions."

Everyone on deck was catapulted into the dark, heaving sea. "As she went under I levered myself onto the rail and was swept clear as she went under me," Sefton remembers. "As I stood on the poop rail I thought, 'Jump!' I went under water for a few seconds. A life raft was 30 ft. away. I thought, 'Oh God, swim!' " The orange rafts were designed to eject and inflate automatically in an emergency, and they did. Clifton McMillan, 16, of Fairfield, Conn., who had just finished his watch when the squall hit, managed to jump into a raft. He saw Bill Earnhardt, 24, of Wycombe, Pa., in the water near by, reached out, and yanked him by the arm 'into the raft. They were among the lucky ones. The Marques went down in less than a minute. "I can guarantee that everybody who was in their cabins asleep would not have the slightest idea of what had happened," said Sefton.

Captain Sauer, who diverted the Zawisza Czarny from the race, arrived on the scene four hours later. He found only eight mates of the Marques alive to tell the tale. A ninth was rescued by another ship. It seems doubtful that any trace of the others will turn up; a Canadian-American air and sea search that ranged over 3,600 square miles of the Atlantic found nothing and was called off four days after the sinking. The rescued sailors called the fatal force that capsized their ship "a rogue wind." "It meant to kill us," asserted John Ash, 24, of Newtown, Pa. "There was nothing we could do." The proud vessel brought to the bottom the silver cup it had captured by winning a previous leg of the tall ships race. But the Marques bequeathed a legacy to future seafarers: the race's organizers hope to raise $50,000 for a Marques Foundation that will train other young sailors to brave and conquer the realm that Lord Byron called "the image of Eternity."

--By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Kevin Stevenson/Hamilton

With reporting by Kevin Stevenson