By ERIC WIBERG

Some years ago, on a flight between New York where I worked in the bulk shipping sector and home in Nassau, I picked up an intriguing memoir set largely in The Bahamas in the airport kiosk. Emblazoned with a haunting image of a young person forlorn atop a cork raft in the ocean, it was called Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean. It was written by the young lady on the raft, some 50 years later: Terry Duperrault Fassbender and Dr Richard Logan. It was absolutely riveting, for reasons you will see.

Most of it was set in eastern Florida or The Bahamas, or the Gulf Stream, and many of the characters, particularly the man who spotted her first, Nicolaos Spachidakis, second officer of the Greek freight ship Captain Theo, were mariners like me. 

Since the story is so devastatingly tragic and unnecessarily violent, there are few bright spots. Thus, the actions of these Greek mariners in Bahamian waters that day are the brightest spot, so we start there. Though death followed her rescue, many deaths preceded it.

On return from The Bahamas, I picked up the phone and the person who answered it was the same Nicolaos Spachidakis. I was surprised to learn that none of those who researched or wrote the memoir had bothered to contact him. 

So, I asked him what it was like to see Terry bobbing in the sea. Though he was about 80 years of age at the time and I was – and am – a stranger to him, being fellow-seafarers, he quickly relaxed and told me his sea story.

He had to conn – or watch – on the day in question; a glorious sunny Gulf Stream day. His ship was Captain Theo, a 8,545-ton dry cargo freighter flagged to Cyprus and owned by Sea Spirit Navigation. 

Built in 1953 and scrapped following a fire in Netherlands in 1976, she was built in Sunderland, UK, and had many previous names, including Carmen, Newcastle Trader, Meandros, Compass Spirit, Nils Amelon (Bahamas flagged, 1966), and Boheme. Spachidakis reported first to Chief Officer Evangelos Arvanitis and then Captain SL Coutsodontis. 

His surname originates in Colchis, eastern Black Sea in what is now Georgia, and in Greek mythology is the destination of the Argonauts, and home to Medea and the Golden Fleece.

The somnolent day would soon take a drastic turn – Spachidakis was trying to keep he and the others on watch alert during the monotonous watch, so he decided to reward whoever spotted the next ship double-helpings of the cook’s lauded desert. It worked, particularly since he would win the prize.

As Captain Theo crossed the busy Northwest Providence Channel between Bimini and Grand Bahama, Nicolaos saw “little dancing whitecaps, then something which, at first glance, looked like debris. 

But on further notice, it looked a little too big for debris, and way too small to be a boat.” Quickly notifying Captain Stylianos Coutsodontis, the freighter soon changed course, and “once they reached alongside the floating object, they were in total disbelief.

It was an 11-year-old girl, with blonde hair, floating in an inflatable all by herself. Someone on board took a picture of the little girl squinting her eyes. The crew members rescued Terry from the inflatable.” 

She said that for four days she had been kept company and guarded by a pod of whales. The only thing more remarkable than her story is the one she later told them. 

And the fact that over 50 years after the events, new details of a game and a prize desert which motivated the watch-standers to be extra vigilant that day has only now come to light.

What happened to Terry, how did she end up drifting alone in the Gulf Stream, and what happened when Captain Theo reported her rescue? 

Here are the essential details, without the luxury of grasping the motivations of a serial killer who murdered his wives and children: Terry’s family was murdered at sea aboard a chartered sailing ketch named Bluebelle south of Grand Bahama.

She jumped overboard and drifted alone for 3.5 days on a cork float. Bluebelle was a 60ft, two-masted sailing ketch, 33 years old with a 115 hp engine owned by Harold Pegg and kept in Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale. 

There were seven persons aboard when they left Florida on November 8, 1961: Captain Julian A Harvey, former navy test pilot who is believed to have killed his second wife for insurance money, his sixth wife Mary Dene, and the Duperrault family from Wisconsin, aged 40 to 7.

Mr Duperrault was a contact lens optometrist in Green Bay, who had served in The Bahamas during World War II and “had long dreamed of taking his wife and children on a week-long family cruise …to The Bahamas”. 

They used their savings to charter Bluebelle for $515, and Harvey for $100 per day; his wife Mary was the cook. They sailed to Bimini and Sandy Point, Abaco, where they bought souvenirs and snorkeled. 

On the final night of the charter, the two men cleared out with district commissioner Roderick Pinder. 

After dinner on board, young Terry went below and her family and the Harveys stayed on deck.

Half an hour after midnight on November 13, a crew member aboard the oil tanker Gulf Lion saw “a man waving frantically from a dinghy drifting in their direction and shouting: ‘Help! I have a dead baby on board!’” 

Pulling the man aboard, crew members observed the deceased body of a red-haired prepubescent girl wearing a life jacket inside the dinghy. 

The man identified himself as Julian Harvey, skipper of the ketch Bluebelle. Then the lies began, and since he was a sea captain at sea, with military experience, many gave Harvey the benefit of the doubt. 

Julian Harvey, aviation poster-boy, husband, father, and captain, killed himself on November 17, just hours of receiving news that Terry had survived the scuttling and her attempted murder. 

When his trial recessed – and before the full dastardliness of his deeds were grasped by the public – he raced to book a motel room, jotted a self-absorbed but unrepentant two-page final letter, and killed himself.

• To be continued.