Catherine was first to be pulled out of the cold water. She’d always been somewhat on the heavy side, normally tipping the scales around 180 pounds. Now, her belly grotesquely bloated by the sea water she had swallowed in her desperate efforts to cheat fate, she might easily have weighed over two hundred pounds.
Displaying hardly any emotion, a crew member of the Carib Gas tanker expertly lashed a rope around the young woman’s wrists and without looking up gave the signal to start hauling. An eyewitness would later say: “Catherine looked like an old drum as they pulled her up the side of the ship, an oil drum that somehow had become tangled in bits of colored cloth.”
By a different account: “They lowered Catherine onto the ship’s deck and the captain hollered for someone to bring up a machine to give her air. Then two other men lifted her onto a drum and tried to squeeze the water out of her. I really couldn’t bear to watch. I went down to the kitchen for some coffee.”
Some 30 minutes after Catherine was fished out of the sea on Friday, June 13, she was laid on her back for the very last time. She had only recently turned 17. On the remembered day Paula had got out of bed in particularly high spirits. As she set about her ritual morning ablutions, dabbing a cautionary extra drop of cheap perfume here and there in preparation for her 10.00 a.m. appointment on the Carib Gas, she happily sang “Do Dem Back,” Calypso Rose’s most recent hit. By 9 o’clock she was ready to join her friends: Agatha, 19; Pauline, 25; Berthia, 30; Catherine and Dorothy, 20. The young women had often serviced visiting ships, individually and as a team.
Premier John Compton was delivering the keynote address at the opening of the spanking new Hewanorra Air Terminal two days later when Paula’s body was taken ashore by a group of fishermen. The premier was saying something about “eradicating pestilence, disease and poverty from our shores” when Paula’s lifeless form was hauled from the water not far from where he stood. A fishing crew from Choiseul had stumbled upon the floating corpse “somewhere near the Vieux Fort coastline.” With no idea of the body’s identity the fishermen had decided to tow it ashore for a proper burial.
Two months after the love vendors had together set off to work on the Carib Gas, the bodies of Agatha and Dorothy are still missing. There have been reports of floating bodies “way, way out to sea” but none sufficiently persuasive to merit serious investigation.
Pauline will “never forget” the day she saw her friend fighting for her young life, a fight as one-sided as a bigot’s argument. While the ladies had graduated with honors from the universities of the street, one thing they had never learned: all were non-swimmers!
“We were on the dock at about 9.30 on the Friday morning,” Pauline easily recalled. “The customs guard stopped us. He said he would not allow us on board the Carib Gas. But the boatswain said it would be alright and we started getting on the tanker. Then the customs man began to fuss and the captain had to come out. He told the guard it was his damn ship and we were his guests and he would not be told who could or couldn’t come aboard. We all got on and the girls started following crew members to different areas. I ended up with the boatswain.”
Pauline recalled it was about 7 p.m. when her client said the ship would be moved from its dockside anchoring to another position about a mile away. She set out to get the other five girls together.
“By the time I got to all of them,” she said, “the tanker had already moved away from the dock. We continued having fun until around twenty minutes to eight. That’s when the boatswain told me the ship would soon be pulling out and we had better start getting ready to go home.” Pauline got her friends together, she said, while the boatswain lowered a dinghy from the tanker.
“I was first to get on board after the man,” Pauline went on. “When we were all aboard, the six of us and the man, he asked me to unfasten the rope that attached the dinghy to the tanker. While I was doing so he tried to get the outboard motor started. None of us was wearing a lifebelt—not even the man. Before I could untie the boat, and before the boatswain got the motor started, one of the girls shifted from her position to the side of the small boat. Before you could say ‘help’ the dinghy had overturned and the girls were screaming; ‘Lord help us. Please, Lord, please save us!’ Some of us tried to hold on to the man but he pushed us away. He said we should hang on to the side of the dinghy. He was only interested in his boat. Berthia splashed toward the tanker and while I was hanging on to the dinghy I saw her scrambling up the Jacobs ladder. I turned and saw Paula fighting for her life. Her blouse covered her face and I knew she was in trouble. I’m not a good swimmer, there was nothing I could do for her. All this time, I’m screaming. I never saw the boatswain attempt to help the girls. I don’t know when Paula drowned. One minute she was there, then the next . . gone. It was by now quite dark. I finally made my way to the tanker.”
A search by the ship two hours later resulted in the discovery of just one body: Catherine’s. “I watched them pull her up by her wrists. I presumed she was alive. The captain hollered for a machine to give her air. I couldn’t bear to watch. I went down for coffee.”
Pauline has since found other means of survival. If only she could as easily get over the psychological effects that have turned her into an insomniac. “I can’t sleep. I have horrible nightmares,” she said. “Sometimes I start to tremble all over and can’t stop. I am through, through with that other life.”
It turns out that Pauline managed to save not only her life but also her earnings on that night of death. “I put the twenty dollars inside my bra just before we got on the dinghy with the boatswain,” she sighed.
Berthia, too, has decided on a less precarious existence. Nevertheless, it’ll be some time before the scars disappear from her nervous eyes. It speaks volumes the way she hugs herself ever so tightly when she relates details of the night she’ll never forget, when it seemed she was alone in the world with no one to hear her screams and her desperate pleas for a Jonah and the whale kind of miracle.
As I write an inquest is scheduled for August 13, at which it is expected, by this reporter, at any rate, some outstanding questions will be answered. It’s alleged the ship’s captain made certain demands on Pauline shortly before he left Vieux Fort, hardly an hour after the discovery of Catherine’s body. Then there’s the matter of the unavailability of lifebelts.
Dare I hope this Christian society will forget at least until after the inquest what the victims did for a living and instead keep in mind they were as human as the rest of us, also deserving of justice? A story from a long time ago comes to mind: I am at a school retreat at the Catholic church in Castries. A visiting priest is in the pulpit recalling a wartime experience. Angrily he spits out the name Stalin, whom he tells his young audience “lived like a yellow dog . . . and now has died like only a dog deserves to die . . .” I remember thinking at the time of my dog Frisky at home and praying to God all was well with her. I need add that after hearing the remembered sermon that never once included the words love, charity, forgiveness my attitude toward men of the cloth was never the same.
Four young St. Lucian women died in horrifying circumstances while trying to stay alive the only way they knew how. There are many lessons to be learned from this sordid and tragic story. May we never forget them!
Article 1 of the Declaration of Social Progress and Development as proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly 1969: “All people’s and all human beings without distinction as to race, color, sex, language, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, family or social status, or political or other conviction, shall have the right to live in dignity and freedom and to enjoy the fruits of social progress . . .”
The preceding was first published in the Vanguard newspaper on August 9, 1975.
