The Pride's Fall

She was in fact as well as name the Pride of Baltimore. A 136-ft. replica of a 19th century schooner, she was slated to be a major ornament of the July 4th celebrations in New York Harbor. Then she ran into a "white squall," a killer blast of 90-m.p.h. wind and water.

The graceful, two-masted vessel, just back from a 15-month European tour, had anchored briefly at the U.S. Virgin Island port of St. John, and was sailing north toward Baltimore on May 14 when the weather turned nasty. The twelve crew members shortened sail to handle the heavy winds. Suddenly, recalled First Mate John Flanagan, "a wall of wind and water" smashed into the Pride with devastating force. "In what seemed like slow motion the boat laid over to port," said Flanagan. There was no time to sound an alarm over the Pride's radio.

In the ensuing chaos, the ship's carpenter and a deckhand were seen floating face down in the water, both presumably dead. Captain Armin Elsaesser III frantically called out for a head count. Then he abruptly swam away, apparently in an attempt to find a missing crew member. He was not seen again.

Squeezed into a raft designed to accommodate six, the eight survivors subsisted for four days and nights on meager rations of sea biscuits and gulps of water twice a day. "The days were barely tolerable," said Flanagan. "The nights were hell." The survivors used up their only three emergency flares and sighted six ships without being able to attract attention. Finally, on the fifth harrowing night, with Deckhand Leslie McNish using a flashlight to blink the international distress signal SOS, the shipwrecked survivors flagged down a Norwegian tanker 335 miles north of Puerto Rico and lived to tell of the Pride's sorrowful fall.