Ship Into Eye of Storm Leaves Grief and Suits
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KEY WEST, Fla. -- All that remains of the cruise ship are two life rafts,
seven life jackets, part of a wooden staircase, photographs of the crew
members that their mothers clutch at a vigil and, eerily, images of the ship
in full sail posted on the Internet as memorials by her former passengers.
 

Fantome, the ship herself, once regal and filled with rum-spiced laughter
and steel-drum songs as she plied the Caribbean, lies on the bottom of the
sea off the coast of Honduras. The 30 West Indian crew members, along with
their 32-year-old British-born captain, disappeared with her in the fury of Hurricane Mitch,
one of the worst tropical storms in history.
 

Now, in lawsuits filed this week in Miami, families of crew members say
their loved ones died because the ship's owner, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises
of Miami, sent the sailors out to sea on a suicide mission to save the
vessel.
 

Company officials, who continue to search for crew members or clues to the
sinking, say they were following standard marine practice, sailing south of
a Caribbean storm to avoid to being battered in port. But the storm changed
course, they said, and enveloped the ship as she was on the verge of safety.
 
 

The Fantome debate is raging along the Eastern Seaboard, as sailors try to
imagine being at the helm of a ship as long as a football field in a storm
with 180-mile-per-hour winds that devastated four countries and killed more
than 11,000 people.
 

But while tall-ship captains and experts on hurricanes and sea safety
question the decision of the company and the captain, they agree that no
matter how good the ship and crew, sometimes storms win.
 

In the case of Fantome, they say, it is almost as if the hurricane hunted
her down.
 

The regular six-day cruise from Omoa, Honduras, to Belize and back was
normally a milk run for Fantome. Passengers were promised visits to rain
forests and Belize's coral reef from the 282-foot steel-hulled four-mast
schooner Fantome, built in 1927 for the Duke of Westminster. She had been
owned by Guinness Brewing and Aristotle Onassis.
 

Windjammer officials found the ship rusting in Kiel, Germany, in 1969 and
after rebuilding her at a cost of $6 million, made her the flagship for a
small fleet carrying vacationers on cruises in which formal wear was a clean
T-shirt. The price of Fantome's cabins ranged from $875 to $1,075 a week.
 

The normal crew of 45 men and women were from Guyana, Grenada and other East
Caribbean countries. Their salaries of $300 to $700 a month made them
affluent in their villages. Under Capt. Guyan March, a boyish Cornwall
native, the ship had a fun-loving crew, former passengers say.
 

But on the night of Oct. 25, a Sunday, as 97 passengers were ferried out to
Fantome in Omoa for what they thought would be the start of their cruise,
rain was coming down in sheets. Though queasy, Karen Rutledge of West
Chester, Pa., remembers the sight of the ship. "It was beautiful," Ms.
Rutledge said, "lit up in the rain. Looking back, it is a haunting vision."
 

The crew had drinks and dinner on the table. Captain March told the
passengers that Hurricane Mitch, which had formed in the Caribbean the
previous Thursday, was moving northwest. Fantome would go east, he said, to
play in Honduras Bay Islands.
 

But by the time the ship set out at midnight, Captain March and his boss,
Michael D. Burke, the president of Windjammer, who was at the company's
headquarters in Miami, had decided to cancel the cruise. Burke, 42, said
Friday that it had been decided that Captain March would sail north 12 hours
to Belize City, where the passengers would get off and board a charter
flight for Miami.
 

As the passengers went down the gangplank in Belize, Hurricane Mitch became
the fourth-fiercest Atlantic storm in history, according to the National
Hurricane Center, and it was headed straight for Belize. Ten crew members,
including all the women, also got off.
 
 

Fantome was cornered by the storm. If she stayed, Burke said, she could have
been sunk or run aground. Burke said he and Captain March decided to go to
sea and take what they thought were their best chances in deep water.
 
 

In hindsight, some experts say, the company chose the ship over the crew. "I
could not have gotten under way in any direction except to the airport and
the hell out of there," said Andy Chase, who teaches tall-ship captains at
the Maine Maritime Academy.
 

As Fantome cleared the Belize reef at 3 P.M. on that Monday, Burke said he
and Captain March talked on satellite telephone, plotting the storm's
forecast track and their possible escape routes. They decided to run 120
miles southeast to hide behind Roatan, a long skinny Bay Island 25 miles off
the Honduras coast. Forecasters had said that the storm would stay north and
that Roatan would reduce its force.
 
 

Fantome arrived at 5 A.M. the next day, Oct. 27, and began tacking back and
forth. Seas were rough and the wind was gusting to 60 miles an hour. The
storm was 75 miles away.
 

But at 1 P.M. the storm turned southwest, confounding computer models at the
National Hurricane Center. "That's when things turned bad," Burke said. "It
was just not an option to stay in the path of a storm with its power." The
ship would have been blown on shore, he said.
 

At 1:15, Burke said, he and Captain March decided that their only hope was
to go east and thread a 25-mile reef-strewn passage between the island of
Guanaja, 10 miles away, and the Honduran shore. The waves were 15 feet high,
the winds 70 m.p.h., and Fantome was rolling heavily, Burke said. The storm
was 45 miles away, with 180-m.p.h. winds.
 

At 4 P.M., Fantome was south of Guanaja and heeling 40 degrees in 100-m.p.h.
winds. Captain March talked to Burke on a satellite phone line they were
keeping open. The captain, Burke said, "was in a battle for his life."
 

The storm and Fantome were then on the same longitude, 85.4 degrees west,
and the wind was shifting to the west. The ship, with sails down, was
entering what is called the navigable quadrant of a storm, Burke said, with
winds at her back that could have blown her to safety.
 

At 4:30 the telephone went dead.
 

Not until 7 P.M., when the National Hurricane Center issued a new storm
position, did Burke find out that the hurricane had jogged southeast and cut
Fantome off. As dark fell, the storm had been 10 miles in front of the ship.
At 10 P.M. the eye reached Guanaja.
 

"Then the worst thing happened," Burke said. The storm stalled for the next
30 hours.
 

There had been no Mayday call from the ship or signals from an emergency
beacon that is supposed to go off automatically when a ship capsizes.
 

Fantome had been through two smaller hurricanes, one of them on Guyan
March's first cruise, when he was a mate under Capt. Paddy Shrimpton.
 

But Fantome was 71 years old when it encountered Hurricane Mitch. Shrimpton
said the ship leaked when he ran her 10 years earlier.
 

The ship was registered in Equatorial Guinea, Africa, in order to avoid
taxes, Burke said.
 

Such registration also allowed it to avoid United States Coast Guard
inspection.
 

But Burke said the ship had been remodeled in 1993 and in May of this year
the ship was certified by an Equatorial Guinea agent as meeting the
standards of the Safety of Life at Sea Compact.
 

Burke said he believed the ship would have passed a Coast Guard test. But
few ships have gone through what Fantome encountered, experts said.
 

"It's one thing for a ship to take a hurricane for 6 hours, but 36 hours?"
said Peg Brandon, a captain and marine superintendent of the Sea Education
Association of Woods Hole, Mass. "Clearly they did the very best they could.
The storm tracked them down." The eye of Hurricane Mitch remained more than
100 miles from Belize.
 

Burke called families of the crew members. The eight families of the sailors
from New Amsterdam, Guyana, began a prayer vigil. They have been holding
photographs of the men in their arms for three hours nightly in the vigil
that is to end on Saturday.
 

Arthurlene Brusch, whose son, Vernon, was a Fantome electrician, said from
her home in New Amsterdam, "I think there is hope it is somewhere."
 

But as the Coast Guard searched fruitlessly, hope dimmed, and a Coast Guard
plane spotted the objects from the ship on Nov. 1.
 

They were retrieved by a British ship.
 

After determining that no person could live in the water more than a week,
the Coast Guard called off its search on Nov. 5. Burke said the company had
provided families of the crew members with two month's salaries until a
long-term settlement could be reached.
 

But William Huggett, a Miami lawyer who represents mariners, filed lawsuits
for the families of five crew members, seeking $1 million for each family.
He said more suits would be filed.
 

"Why didn't they just beach the ship and get the men off?" Huggett asked.
"That's just putting the value of the vessel over the lives of the men. It's
incredibly greedy."
 

Burke said he had hired Jeeps, planes and skin divers to keep looking for
survivors or victims.
 

"There remains a glimmer of hope that they are in the mud of a village
someplace, no phone booth, wandering around," he said.
 

In Par, England, Friday, Captain March's mother Jenny, 57, commodore of the
Porthpean Sailing Club where her son learned to sail, said her hope was
gone. "It would be a miracle," Mrs. March said. She said she had no plans to
sue Windjammer.
 

"Guyan wouldn't have sailed if he didn't think it was safe," she said.
 

In West Chester, Pa., Ms. Rutledge, whose Fantome voyage was canceled,
called to make reservations for a replacement cruise.
 

Captain March was incredibly brave, she said, adding, "He saved my life."
 

But her next cruise, she said, would not be in hurricane season.