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Mary Celeste soon disappeared into the coral that grew over her timbers and buried her decks. Despite her previous notoriety, she died neglected and forgotten, her drama played out on a barren reef in Haiti, perhaps in revenge by the ghosts of her vanished crew.
Armed with enough research data to give it a good shot, I began making plans to charter a boat and sail to Rochelais Reef. I contacted Mr. Mark Sheldon, who had purchased my favorite old search boat, Arvor III. This was the vessel I had sailed on when searching for the Bonhomme Richard in 1980. I chartered her again in 1984, when my team and I encountered all sorts of wild adventures in the North Sea, finding sixteen shipwrecks while losing a war of words with the French navy in Cherbourg, France, who refused to allow us to search for the Confederate raider Alabama.
I had pla
John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions then stepped in and offered to set up an expedition to conduct the search. Since John and his team are from Nova Scotia and Mary Celeste was built in Nova Scotia, they had a strong incentive to find the wreck. They were also enthusiastic about making a Sea Hunters documentary about the ship.
In April of 2001, John set up the logistics, chartered a boat, and sent me round-trip airline tickets to Haiti. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the evening and was mildly surprised to see no one there to meet me. I hailed a shuttle van and headed for the Sheraton Hotel, then walked alone into the lobby, to the surprise of Davis. He had sent a friend to meet me, who had somehow missed picking me out of the deplaning crowd.
With a face like mine, I wondered how I could be lost in the crowd. I began to wonder if this was the start of an ordeal. I was sure my guardian angel had gone on vacation and an evil demon taken his place, especially when I found I’d forgotten my passport. How’s that for dementia?
John didn’t give it a thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. “The Haitians won’t care.”
Images of being thrown into a Haitian jail streamed through my mind. I called my wife, Barbara, and asked her to send the passport through the airline’s courier service. Just to play it safe, she faxed the pertinent pages to the hotel, at least so I had some kind of identification for Haitian immigration if for some reason the passport did not arrive.
Naturally, the airplane with my passport was late, which wasn’t too disastrous. I still had almost an hour before our scheduled departure. Exotic Lynx Airlines, our air carrier to Haiti, had other plans. Unexpectedly, the clerk at the counter a
Where had I heard that before?
Somehow I didn’t relish the idea of entering into a third world country that had revolutionaries stalking the hills, without proper credentials. Left with no choice, I arranged with Craig Dirgo, who was living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, to pick up my passport when it finally arrived.
The flight was on a nineteen-passenger DeHavilland prop plane. It was uneventful except for a huge black man who resembled Mike Tyson seated in back of me. He was terrified of flying and clutched the back of my seat every time we hit turbulence. As I looked down on the islands surrounded by turquoise waters, I had dreams of arriving at a sun-drenched tropical paradise with local natives playing marimbas and steel drums while passing around piña coladas. The bubble was burst as the plane touched down at a weed-infested airstrip and I was jolted back to reality. There was no terminal, only a bunch of dilapidated shacks strung around a dusty parking lot filled with battered old French and Japanese autos.
We disembarked and headed for the immigration shack. Thankfully, my perceptive eye noted that my suitcase and John’s bag had been stowed in the nose section of the plane when we left Fort Lauderdale. I turned and saw that the Haitian baggage handler, after removing the passengers’ luggage from the rear of the plane, was pushing his load, minus our bags, on a cart across the field. With John following, I returned to the airplane, unlatched the locks on the nose section, lifted it up, and removed our bags. No one interfered. If we hadn’t snagged our luggage from the plane’s nose, they’d have been on their way back to Fort Lauderdale in another twenty minutes.
I smiled my best smile, and the immigration official graciously stamped my fax copy passport and waved me through.
“See,” said Davis, “didn’t I tell you? A piece of cake.”
“Now the trick is to get out,” I muttered, wondering what I was getting myself into.
Davis had arranged for us to stay at the Cormier Plage Hotel, a tropical paradise in a cove farther up the coast not far from the border with the Dominican Republic. The resort is owned by Jean Claude and Kathy Dicquemare, who had lived in Haiti over twenty-five years. The plan was for Davis and me to stay overnight until the boat containing the rest of the team arrived from Fort Lauderdale by sea. After clearing customs, we were met by Jean Claude’s nephew, whose name unfortunately escapes me. We came out into a mob scene stomping up a cloud of dust. There were hundreds of Haitians milling about the airport — doing what, I have no idea.
We were stormed by little boys demanding a dollar. Considering the poverty of the nation, these kids don’t mess around. In most countries I’ve visited, the little beggar boys and girls usually ask for coins.
After throwing our bags in the back of a little Honda SUV, we drove through the port city of Cape Haitian. I’ve seen squalor before, but nothing I’ve ever seen compared to this. The worst slums in the hills above Rio de Janeiro looked like Beverly Hills compared to this place. The streets were in total disrepair, with battered old cars, some moving, some parked and stripped, cluttering the landscape. Buildings were crumbling like they were rotting from within. Any place else, they would have been condemned years before. Mobs of people wandered the streets and sidewalks, as if searching for something that didn’t exist. We passed a huge ten-acre dump, where hordes of people were shoveling garbage and trash into plastic bags and carting it home in wheelbarrows. It was not a pretty sight.
We finally left the self-destructing town and traveled over the mountain on a road that had not been graded in ten years — no, make that twenty. We passed shanties with scrawny chickens pecking barren ground, long lines of people at a single water faucet, waiting to fill their plastic jugs, staring at us as if we’d just flown down from the moon. At seeing their thin bodies, I began to feel self-conscious about being twenty pounds overweight.
The potholes looked like the size of meteor craters, and the ruts were as deep as the trenches in World War I. Yet the landscape was scenic and quite beautiful. The few areas on the mountain where the trees had not been cut down were quite picturesque. I have found it easy to imagine Haiti as a beautiful nation in the years that have passed.
We finally dropped down into a delightful cove with hundreds of palm trees. Village shacks lined one side of the road, and the children were playing happily while their mothers washed clothes in a stream flowing down from the mountains. Jean Claude’s nephew turned the truck through the gate of the resort and we met Jean Claude and Kathy, a quiet lady who obviously ran the show behind the scenes. Jean Claude is a genuine character — someone that everyone should have as a friend. Though we were both pushing seventy, he was twice as active as I was. He dove at least once every day, and often two or three times. He kept a record that revealed he had already slipped beneath the waves 165 times. The term half manlhalf fish applied to Jean Claude.