Scornavacchi was in his room in an Elizabeth City motel when definitive word arrived. The crew from a third Coast Guard helicopter had finally found Christian in the water near the Bounty, but she was unresponsive, with no vital signs. Two Bounty crew members later said that her corpse bore the signs of severe cranial trauma: heavy bruising on one side of the face and a partially crumpled skull. That could have meant that she was killed by a blow from one of the falling masts, or it could have meant that she slipped unconscious into the water and quickly drowned. As for Walbridge, the search was ongoing. A day later, it would be called off.
Unresponsive, no vital signs. The official terminology, the way it depersonalized the dead and the lost, it unnerved Scornavacchi. He summoned an image of Christian as he had last seen her, lashing together the gear and supplies on the deck of the Bounty. She had looked almost peaceful there, even as the ship was going down, an easy smile on her face.
That night, Scornavacchi called his mother in Pennsylvania. She’d seen the news—she knew what had happened to the Bounty. “But I’m alive, Mom,” he said. “I made it.” He held the receiver to his ear and listened to his mother sob.
Ten. February 12, 2013, 9:00 a.m.
It was not hard to pick out Dina and Rex Christian in the crowded ballroom. They sat a couple rows back from the microphones, alongside their lawyer. To their left was a battery of television cameras, and behind them, arranged across a wide expanse of brightly patterned carpeting, were the reporters, maritime lawyers, and local sailors with a few hours to kill.
Dina Christian passed most of the hours of the Coast Guard’s hearing on the Bounty sinking in rigid silence, sometimes dabbing her eyes with a tissue, sometimes shaking her head furiously, and sometimes leaning in to whisper to Rex, a rumpled man in his sixties. Anyone who looked closely at Dina—small, blond, with a gently upturned nose and round cheeks—would have noticed the striking resemblance she bore to her only daughter, Claudene.
The Renaissance Portsmouth Hotel and Conference Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, where the hearing was held, looms over the Elizabeth River. From the hallway outside the second floor ballroom, you could look out across the wind-chopped water to Norfolk, where a navy aircraft carrier and a handful of smaller ships, bristling with scaffolding and plastic tarp, awaited repairs. Every morning, at precisely 8:50 a.m., Coast Guard Commander Kevin Carroll, clad in his dress blues, arrived and took his place in the front of the ballroom, a few yards from where the Christians sat.
Carroll is in his forties, thickly built and tall, with a high-and-tight military style haircut and a brusque, if not entirely unfriendly, interrogative style. Three and a half months after the Bounty’s sinking, Carroll had been tasked with conducting the official inquiry into the incident, with sorting out the messy particulars of what exactly had gone wrong. He opened each day of testimony with a lengthy invocation of the pertinent federal regulatory code—a paragraph on marine casualties and investigations—followed by a standing moment of silence for the lost.
It had taken only a few days after the sinking for the second-guessing to begin. The questions percolated in the comments sections of articles about the incident, on the message boards and Facebook pages frequented by tall-ship buffs, in the letters pages of sailing magazines. Although they spoke fondly of him as a person, few of Robin Walbridge’s fellow tall-ship captains seemed able to comprehend his decision to sail through the hurricane—or, more bafflingly, to cut across its center mass on October 28.
In an open letter to Walbridge circulated in mid-November, Jan Miles, the captain of the schooner Pride of Baltimore II, had compared the Bounty’s sinking to that of the Fantome, a schooner that went down off the coast of Belize in 1998, killing all thirty-one crew members aboard—the worst Atlantic sailing disaster in forty years. Like Walbridge, Miles wrote, Fantome’s skipper had tried to outrun a hurricane on a set of underpowered engines and placed too much faith in the accuracy of hurricane forecasts. Addressing his still-missing colleague, Miles wrote,
You aimed all but directly at Sandy. That was reckless my friend! Was it wise or prudent to set off into the teeth of Sandy in BOUNTY[?] Did it make any sense at all? Virtually all of your professional friends and colleagues back here do not think so … Yeah, you were a reckless man Robin. I would not have continued to proceed as you did.
Joining Miles in his criticism were the Christians, who believed that their daughter would still be alive if Walbridge had kept Bounty in port. “Fact: Walbridge took [Claudene] into the worse hurricane & did not except [sic] help from the [Coast Guard] until it was to late for her,” Dina wrote on Facebook in January. “When everyone else was in the water, she was seen holding on to the ship for dear life. Too scared to go into the water! After reading all this, how can any of you defend this Crazy Nut?”
There was one group of people who did not buy the emerging consensus that Walbridge’s navigational errors and hubris were wholly responsible for the Bounty’s end: the ship’s crew. As many of them would point out, the ship had been through bad storms before and survived them all. Bounty had crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, motored through gales in the Gulf, threaded some of the most treacherous passages on earth. And in each circumstance, Walbridge had acquitted himself well.
It stood to reason, then, that the sinking was not only a matter of the Bounty’s position relative to the hurricane on October 29—that factors beyond Walbridge’s control had turned an ill-advised voyage into a doomed one. In this scenario, the blame that had fallen on Walbridge belonged more properly to Robert Hansen and the HMS Bounty Foundation.
Hansen had long struggled to adequately maintain the ship with the meager funds earned from dock tours and day sails. Patchwork measures had been undertaken to get Bounty from one port of call to the next. “Being a Bounty alumnus was kind of a point of pride,” one former mate recalls. “You’re part of a club. And you’re part of that club because you’ve been sailing around the world on a boat that you’ve been constantly digging around in the bottom of the Lego drawer trying to put back together. Not to mix metaphors, but Bounty was the Bad News Bears of the tall ship world.”
According to one legend circulated among new crew members, shortly before a Coast Guard inspection in the 1990s, a small fire had broken out on the Bounty. It allegedly smoldered for a full three days, and was smoldering still when the coastguardsmen came aboard, but the crew—in a scene that sounded like something out of a bad sitcom—was able to keep the inspectors distracted and away from the fire. “I learned a lot about how to handle boats from Robin,” a former crewmember says. “And I learned far more about how to handle people.”
Since 2008, Hansen had been attempting to sell the Bounty, and Walbridge had taken an active role in the discussions. At one point, the captain had reached out to the British billionaire playboy Richard Branson, who had sailed on the Bounty, asking him to buy the ship; Branson declined. Later, according to Outside magazine, Walbridge established contact with the Ashley DeRamus Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and raising awareness about people with Down’s syndrome, in the hope of outfitting the Bounty as “a place of learning and inspiration” for special-needs visitors. In St. Petersburg, in fact, Walbridge had planned a tour for the foundation’s members.
Coast Guard hearings do not have the authority to determine criminal responsibility or levy any civil penalties; Carroll was in Portsmouth as an investigator, not a jurist. But his findings—drawn from nine full days’ worth of testimony of survivors, coastguardsmen, surveyors, and ship inspectors—would be admissible in civil or criminal court. And since the Christian family was widely believed to be preparing a lawsuit against the HMS Bounty Foundation, the hearings had the feeling of a practice trial.
On one side were the Christians and Jacob Shisha, their lawyer, a veteran maritime litigator with a showman’s demeanor and a trace of a New York accent. On the other side were Tracie Simonin and Robert Hansen of the Bounty Foundation, and their
two attorneys, Frank Ambrosino and Leonard Langer. There was also a third, unexpected party: John Svendsen, the Bounty’s first mate and the first survivor who had been pulled out of the water in the gray dawn of October 29.
The Coast Guard had named Svendsen a “party in interest” in the investigation. In maritime law, this can mean one of two things. A party in interest may be a person, company, or organization suspected of bearing some responsibility for the accident in question. Or it may be someone with an unusually large stake in the investigation’s outcome, one way or another—someone who stands to lose or gain from the inquiry’s findings, perhaps, or someone who holds the key to understanding what happened.
The Coast Guard did not specify the grounds on which Svendsen had been summoned to Portsmouth. But whatever Carroll’s reasoning, making Svendsen a principal in the investigation filled what would otherwise have been a conspicuous vacancy in the proceedings. Hansen had taken the fifth, and was not on hand for the hearing. Walbridge was lost at sea and presumed dead. So Svendsen, Walbridge’s deputy, became the de facto defender of the Bounty and of the people who had looked after her maintenance and charted her course that last week in October. He was the stand-in for the captain whose actions, many now believed, had come at the expense of Claudene Christian’s life and his own.
As a party in interest, Svendsen was given a chair near the front of the room and the opportunity to question every witness. Shisha had petitioned the Coast Guard to give the Christians the same standing, and shortly before the hearings began, Rex and Dina were granted it. The reason for Shisha’s request wasn’t stated. But the implications seemed obvious: By directly questioning the witnesses, he could potentially begin building a case against the HMS Bounty Foundation.
Svendsen was the first witness Carroll summoned when the hearing commenced on the morning of February 12. The first mate had sustained serious injuries to his face, hand, shoulder, and torso during the storm, and he moved slowly and deliberately to the front of the ballroom. He was dressed in a floral button-down under a black fleece, and his dirty-blond hair hung lankly to his shoulders. A conspicuous murmur arose in his wake. Seating himself in front of the microphones, Svendsen steepled his long fingers on the table and allowed Carroll to walk him through the days leading up to the sinking of Bounty.
Of particular concern to Carroll was Walbridge’s August television interview in which he had spoken of chasing hurricanes. At the time, the comments had seemed like the boasts of a daring sailor. Now they looked a lot more like tragic foolhardiness—proof of Walbridge’s poor judgment.
“Did Bounty chase hurricanes?” Carroll asked Svendsen bluntly.
“Not in my opinion,” Svendsen replied. He maintained that Walbridge’s comments had been widely misunderstood. The captain had not been advocating the “chasing of hurricanes” as a matter of pleasure or thrill, he said. He had simply been stating the truth—that hurricanes can generate a strong but manageable boost of wind power to a full-rigger like Bounty. “I never witnessed Robin seeking out a storm. If there was a storm, he would put the ship in the safest position in the storm,” Svendsen said.
Svendsen appeared to imply that Walbridge had been correct in the abstract— “you’ll get a good ride out of the hurricane”—and wrong in the case of Sandy, which was much larger than Walbridge had assumed. As Brock Vergakis of the Associated Press later noted, Walbridge had inveighed in the same interview against ever getting “in front” of a hurricane—but by cutting southwest toward Hatteras, Walbridge had inadvertently done exactly that.
Svendsen, however, made it clear that he did not hold Walbridge entirely blameless for the sinking. He recalled that he had stressed to Walbridge the historic nature of the storm and worried aloud about the Bounty’s ability to withstand it. “I had mentioned other options as far as staying in and not going out to sea,” Svendsen said.
These pleas were apparently offered semiprivately, in the presence of other mates, and in at least one case, privately to Walbridge. But Walbridge, Svendsen testified, had faith in the Bounty, and was determined to press southward. “Robin felt the ship was safer at sea,” he said.
Equally striking was Svendsen’s recollection that twice in the early morning hours of October 29, he had requested that Walbridge issue an abandon ship order. Twice Walbridge refused. The captain apparently believed that the Bounty, even without power, would remain afloat, and that the crew would be safer on board than in the life rafts. In hindsight, Walbridge had badly misjudged the condition of his ship. It was not safe at all—it was sinking fast.
Had Walbridge issued the abandon ship order earlier in the morning, when the ship was more stable, an orderly procession to the life rafts might have occurred. Instead, she began to roll over before the rafts were even fully inflated. Chaos reigned on deck, and in the end the entire crew was dumped more or less unprepared into the sea. For an inexperienced sailor like Claudene Christian, an earlier order might have meant the difference between life and death.
Eleven. Wednesday, February 13, 10:00 a.m.
Hardly anyone on board the Bounty during her final voyage in October had failed to note that the ship was taking on water. Even in relatively calm weather, there was always a leak—a trickle here, some seepage there. Were those leaks ordinary for a wooden ship her age? Or were they evidence that Bounty was dangerously dilapidated?
The task of answering those questions fell to Todd Kosakowski of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, who had worked on Bounty during the month she spent in dry dock in the fall of 2012, shortly before she sailed for St. Petersburg. The crew at Boothbay had caulked leaky seams, installed new fuel tanks, replaced rotten planks, and touched up the Bounty’s paint job. Kosakowski, a clean-cut man who bears a closer resemblance to an accountant than a shipyard worker, had been the manager for the project. As such, he was one of the last naval professionals to see the Bounty in one piece.
Kosakowski told Kevin Carroll that shortly after the Bounty had been brought to the shipyard, he and his workers had pulled up some planking near the mizzenmast and mainmast and found significant amounts of rot—a “dry, almost charred-looking” kind of rot, Kosakowski said.
“Did you tell Captain Walbridge?” Carroll asked.
“Yes,” Kosakowski said.
“What did he say?”
“He was a little shocked when we first started looking into it,” Kosakowski admitted. “His shock turned to awe when we were prodding the other framing and finding the same signs of degradation. Once we started looking at the other frames, we saw it was more widespread.” Kosakowski came to believe that as much as 75 percent of the framing above the vessel’s waterline was rotten.
The rotten wood needed to be removed and replaced, Kosakowski said, and he had recommended to Walbridge that he allow the shipyard crew to inspect the rest of the Bounty, cutting out the worst of the damage and installing fresh white oak in its place. Kosakowski testified that Walbridge agreed to a few replacements but resisted a deeper—and inevitably more costly—investigation. “[Walbridge’s] response,” he said, “was that they would deal with the hull at the next year’s hull exam”—the annual inspection conducted by the Coast Guard. But that exam wasn’t scheduled until 2014, which worried Kosakowski.
He told Carroll that he met twice more with Walbridge to talk about the rot. On that second occasion, Walbridge told Kosakowski that he wanted the issue to “stay between the two of us,” Kosakowski testified, “and that he explained these problems to the owner, [and] that I didn’t need to be worried.”
An audible murmur passed through the crowd in the ballroom. The captain of a ship that would sail into a hurricane two months later, allegedly asking a yard worker to keep quiet the extent of the rot on his vessel—in the words of one prominent maritime safety analyst, the disclosure was nothing short of “stunning.” Had Walbridge, as he promised Kosakowski, actually informed Hansen about the rot? Or had he chosen to keep Kosakowski’s discovery to himself?
No one
could say—one of the men was missing and the other had refused to testify or grant interviews since the wreck. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the horrible bind in which this revelation would have placed the captain. For Walbridge, everything was riding on Bounty’s fate. His sense of identity was irrevocably linked to the ship. Had she been mothballed, it might have been devastating to him. Would he have taken that risk and told Hansen? Or would he have done whatever it took to keep Bounty sailing?
• • •
The strongest counterargument to Kosakowski’s bombshell, as it happened, came from his own former colleague. Joe Jakomovicz, a veteran shipwright with a shock of white hair and a thick Maine accent, was a former yard manager of the Boothbay shipyard, where he had overseen previous repairs on the Bounty, including a 2006 renovation. Testifying before Carroll, Jakomovicz argued that Kosakowski was drastically overstating the extent of the rot on Bounty. Kosakowski, he pointed out, had “five or six years of experience,” while he had forty. “I’ve seen worse,” Jakomovicz said of the damage. “The key thing here is that it’s a fifty-yearold boat,” he added. “You have to realize that that’s tired.”
That didn’t mean that the ship was seaworthy or that it wasn’t—Jakomovicz was retired when the Bounty arrived in Boothbay in 2012—only that Jakomovicz had encountered such situations before. He remembered seeing a few photos of the Bounty sinking, and had marveled that, despite the rough seas, the ship had not split apart. “I said, ‘My God, that boat’s still floating and intact.’” Jakomovicz recalled, shaking his head. “That was surprising to me.”
And yet the crew had seen it: the ocean sluicing through dozens of open seams, overwhelming the pumps. Dan Cleveland told the coastguardsmen as much in Portsmouth when it was his turn to testify later that week. Besides John Svendsen, Cleveland was the officer with perhaps the fullest understanding of Bounty, having spent five years on the ship, including a significant amount of time dealing with yard work and repairs. On the night the ship sank, while John Svendsen was in the navigation shack communicating with the Coast Guard, Cleveland was mostly belowdecks, trying to bail out the ailing vessel. Around midnight, Cleveland said, the ship had lost power, then flickered back to life again. But the Bounty was rolling hard now—hard enough that the starboard engine was temporarily underwater.
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