Can You Do That?

“We should go back” I said.

It had been five years since we’d stayed at the exclusive Palm Island Resort for our twentieth anniversary and we were fast approaching our twenty-fifth, “…but I wouldn’t want to repeat ourselves by duplicating the same trip.”

“I agree” said Marliss, “but other than staying more than just three nights, what else could we do differently?”

“What if we booked a Caribbean cruise on one of those tall ships and then, when the ship sails by Palm Island, we jump off and swim to shore for a full week’s stay. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Can you do that?” she replied.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out”

Minutes later I was online reading about the tall ships of the Windjammer Barefoot Cruise line. Captain Mike Burke, a sea-loving captain had started the company way back in 1946 and now, forty-seven years later, some of the tall ships in his fleet were still sailing. The Yankee Clipper, a one hundred-ninety-eight foot three-masted schooner was currently offering six day cruises out of St. Georges Harbor in Grenada and her island-hopping itinerary did indeed pass by Palm Island.

“Maybe we really could jump off a ship and swim to our island” I mused. Without knowing the specifics of the cruise’s itinerary, I went ahead and booked the luxurious Captains Cabin (it was our Silver Anniversary after all) and then quickly made reservations for ten nights in Palm’s Beachfront Cabin #12, the same cabin we had stayed in on our previous visit.

Three months later we landed in Grenada one day prior to our ship’s scheduled departure so we could attend an overnight stowaway party. When we arrived at the pier, a steel-drum band was playing Calypso music on the foredeck and we were welcomed aboard by a young and very attractive British Captain, Guyan March. Later that evening, as we stood along the rail enjoying the tropical ocean breezes and our refreshing rum swizzles, we watched transfixed as schools of Yellow Jack swam silently into and then out of the translucent pools of turquoise light glowing along her starboard side. It was a truly mystical experience.

The Yankee Clipper was a dream ship.

Originally named Cressida, she was commissioned in 1927 by Hermann Oelrichs Jr. and built in Kiel Germany by the Krupp Germaniawerft for $1.4 million (about $19 million today). At the time, she was the largest privately owned yacht registered in the U.S. Hermann’s father was a steamship magnate and a champion amateur boxer who once challenged the World Boxing Champion John L. Sullivan to a prize fight but, even with a purse of $10,000, Sullivan declined. Hermann’s mother, Theresa Fair, was heiress to a vast fortune. Her father, James Graham Fair, was one of the four partners who discovered Nevada’s gold-and-silver-rich Comstock Lode in 1859.

Theresa’s younger sister Virginia was married to William K. Vanderbilt II. In 1910, when Hermann was 19 years old, his aunt Virginia bet him $500,000 ($6.5 million today) that he wouldn’t be able to abstained from using alcohol or tobacco until he was 21. Hermann won the bet.

In 1930, following the stock market crash, Cressida’s ownership was transferred to Albert E. Pierce of Chicago, though her home port remained as New York City. She was again re-registered in 1932 by the Pierce Investment Company, prompting then President Roosevelt to charge a number of New York’s wealthy yacht owners with tax dodging by incorporating their boats.

It was during this time that Adolf Dick, the thirty-eight year old heir to the National Sugar Refining Company (now Domino’s Sugar) chartered the Cressida and her crew of twenty-one for a four month pleasure cruise. When he was twenty one, Adolf was best man when his older brother married a woman named Madeleine Force. Four years earlier, the eighteen year old Madeline had married a newly divorced forty-seven year old named John Jacob Astor. Following their extended European honeymoon, they booked passage on the maiden voyage of the HMS Titanic. John died when the ship went down but his nineteen year old wife, who was five months pregnant at the time, survived. Later, Madeline relinquished her claim to the Astor fortune so she could marry her childhood sweetheart William K. Dick.

The passengers on Cressida’s South Sea Islands adventure included two of Adolph’s good friends from Yale University; Oliver B. Jennings, son of the Vice President of Standard Oil and the architect Lawrence G. Noyes. Oliver brought along his Ecuadorian wife Isabel and Lawrence was joined by Polly Campbell, the unmarried sister-in-law of the President of General Motors.

Oliver also persuaded the now famous photographer Walker Evans to come along as the official cruise photographer. He most likely knew Evans through the Opffer brothers, Ivan and Emil. Ivan Opffer was a visual artist who worked for news publications drawing portraits of well known scientific and literary personalities like Albert Einstein, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and Aldous Huxley. Emil Opffer was a poet. Emil was also Hart Crane’s lover and Hart Crane was one of Walker Evan’s closest friends.

DEEPER DIVE FOR THE HISTORY BUFFS

Evans met Crane beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in 1928. Crane, living in Emil Opffer’s father’s house with a clear view of the span, was shaping The Bridge, his American answer to The Waste Land. The two frequented the bridge; Evans for pictures, Crane for vision, and bonded as kindred strivers from fractured homes.

Crane had loudly championed Alfred Stieglitz at a 1923 show, promising (and never delivering) an essay. Five years later Evans, sent by Stefan Hirsch (a friend of Diego Rivera), waited at Stieglitz’s gallery with Georgia O’Keeffe, who was warm and candid about his prints. Stieglitz finally looked, but said nothing; Evans nursed the slight and carried a grudge against Stieglitz for many years.

Hart Crane eventually wore out his welcome at the Opffer home. With moral and financial backing from his publishers, Harry and Caresse Crosby, he planned a trip to Paris where he could finish The Bridge. Before crossing the Atlantic, Crane threw a roaring send-off with Dalí, Cartier-Bresson, Joyce, Hemingway, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Evans, E. E. Cummings, and Malcolm and Peggy Cowley.

While in France, Crane was able to complete his poem, but also got into a lot of trouble. After weeks of carousing with gay sailors and living on oysters, absinthe, and opium, he brawled with police over an unpaid bar tab. Arrested, he spent six days in jail: E. E. Cummings tried unsuccessfully to bail him out; Harry Crosby paid the fine and secured his passage back to New York.

There, in preparation for publishing his poem, Crane looked for a suitable illustration for The Bridge. His preference was to use a reproduction of a painting of the Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella, but the expense of printing it in color proved to be too costly. Instead, Crane and his publishers decided to use a black and white photograph taken by Walker Evans.

Following a series of mediocre reviews, Hart fell into a deep depression and threatened to commit suicide by jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge so he could go out “with a bang,” but he was temporarily buoyed when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Mexico on a steamship with his good friend Peggy Crowley, who had recently agreed to a divorce from her husband.

Unfortunately, Hart’s time abroad coincided with Walker Evan’s South Seas trip on the Cressida. As Hart and Peggy were returning to New York, he was physically beaten because he made a pass at one of the ship’s crew members. Following a night of heavy drinking and in the one-day-old wake of the returning Cressida, Hart was heard shouting “Goodbye everybody” as he threw himself overboard. His body was never found. Ironically, Hart Crane’s father was the candy manufacturer from Ohio who is credited with inventing “Life Savers” candy, even as the epitaph on his son’s grave reads “Lost at Sea.”

Evan's returned from his Cressida trip to the terrible news.

In 1937, Hermann Oelrichs’ cousin George Washington Vanderbilt III chartered Cressida for a South Pacific science cruise. George, the son of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt — who skipped the Titanic in 1912 at his mother-in-law’s warning but died three years later on the Lusitania when George was one — bought her in 1938, renamed her Pioneer, and spent four years on expeditions to Sumatra, Panama, the Galápagos, and the Caribbean. During WWII she was commandeered by the U.S. Navy as El Cano. After the war she lingered in Hawaii, then Newport, Rhode Island, as a seven-year “party boat.”

In April 1961, a bankrupt George donated Pioneer to Stanford for oceanography; before the paperwork was signed he jumped from a window at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins. Title reverted to the estate and she was auctioned in Florida to Captain Mike Burke in 1964. Burke rechristened her Yankee Clipper for his Barefoot Cruises. Twenty years later she struck a sand bar off St. Martins when her anchor lost to Hurricane Klaus. Everyone was safe, but the ship was battered. In repairs, Captain Burke added a third mast and a second deck — the one I stood on when I asked Captain Guyan March if Marliss and I could jump in and swim to shore.

“Sure,” he said.

“Good,” I said, “because we’re not coming back.”

He was surprised we’d already booked Palm Island, but agreed to ferry our bags.

The next morning we watched from the beach as the Yankee Clipper sailed away, continuing her island hopping tour back to Grenada. When we left Palm ten days later, the customs agent on Union Island noticed that our passports didn’t show any record of our arrival. “How did you get here?” he asked.

With a not too subtle grin I replied…

”We swam.”