Disaster

Across the triumphal homecoming of the Commander in Chief of Brazil's victorious Expeditionary Force fell the shadow of Brazil's worst naval disaster.

It was the Fourth of July. The ancient cruiser Baia was patrolling the South Atlantic along the route that Allied planes fly from Natal to Dakar. With four U.S. Navy technicians aboard, some of the Brazilian sailors were celebrating Independence Day. A stunning explosion rocked the Baia. Subsequent blasts literally blew her apart. Blue-bloused sailors were tossed into the waves. Commander Davila Garcia Albuquerque, his arm shattered by the explosion, shouted to his crew, "Save yourselves; I'm finished." But few of them were able to. Three minutes after the first explosion the Baia sank.

Four days later, the British freighter S.S. Balfe came upon six of the Baia's life rafts, pulled aboard the 22 miserable survivors who gave the world its first hint of the disaster. Later, other rescue vessels picked up a few more of the Baia's 400-odd crew members, landed them at the port of Recife before a crowd of solemn men and weeping women. Only a handful were saved. The survivors believed that the Baia had struck a floating mine, exploded the magazine.

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