By Eric Wiberg

Somewhere in The Bahamas, afloat, aground, or underwater, is a medium-sized tugboat built 80 years ago which was recently confirmed to have hosted the witnesses to the last ever German U-boat attack, in 1945 off Newport, Rhode Island, hours before VE-Day.

Most of the story is clear and well-documented, however her movements in recent decades go cold, starting with oil-prospecting firms in Las Vegas and a waterfront at Arawak Cay cluttered with rusting old tugs. This article is published in the hope that someone on the sand and gravel and oil prospecting business in The Bahamas may come forward.

The tug in question was last known as Carina (2009-2024, in Bahamas), before that Ocean King (the first, in Boston, 2004-2009) and before that the Margaret Sheridan in New York (1951-2003) and originally the Chaplain in New York (1946-1950).

The last living crew to see the last U-boat attack gave this author permission to publish the story with his last breath in 2018. In April of that year a German-American woman named Luise Coley contacted me with a surprising story. Her father-in-law Louis Alfred Coley, Jr. served in the US Merchant Marine from 1942 to 1945. In 1946, the Chaplain (179 tons, 95ft long, 25ft wide), joined the fleet of Sheridan Towing as Margaret Sheridan.

From 1951 to 2004, she sailed under the ownership of Red Star Towing, then Amerada-Hess, in 1977, then Farrell Ocean Services, then McKeil Marine Company, Russell Tripp, and Bay State Towing. Then Constellation Tug Company of Boston renamed her Carina from 2004 to 2009, after which the tug was sold. During her last years in Boston, she was little-used, her last US-owner referred to her as the “old girl”, and Pond Prince.

Why does this matter? Because in early May 1945, as the war in Europe was waning to its very last days an American steamer named Black Point set off from Newport News, Virginia for an unescorted voyage to near Boston with 7,595 tons of coal with 45 men under Captain Charles Prior.

On the evening of May 5, she was rounding Point Judith Rhode Island roughly four miles from land. There were two other freighters, a tanker, and a tug towing two barges visible to the lookouts. That tug was named Chaplain, and had been launched just weeks before at the Ira S Bushey shipyard in Brooklyn. It was steam-powered, with a Fairbanks-Morse engine of 1,000 horsepower. Her owner was Spentonbush Fuel Transport, and one of her deck-hands was Louis Coley, a 19-year-old waterman whose mother, Catherine Madden, was born and raised on a barge in Boston.

Coley said that “the sub was right under, and along their tug, and used it as cover, travelling in their shadow. His crew didn’t realise this until it was too late, and the ship had been hit.”

Then Coley watched as “…the Black Point was being circled by the U-boat, and he saw the ship went down.” Being practical men, as soon as the crew of the Chaplain realised they were in the middle of a U-boat battlefield, they got out of the vicinity, which would explain the absence of records about their presence. Perhaps because they fled, Coley was for most of his long life unwilling to share his story. Before allowing me to share his story, he asked if I “was a card-carrying US Merchant Mariner?” When told I am, he said “then it’s alright.” His daughter-in-law said “…it was the most he talked in weeks.” Mr. Coley, waterman all his life, died a few hours after giving me approval.

Constellation in Boston renamed Ocean King Carina to avoid confusion with another tug of that name and are said to have sold her to a company in the Bahamas in 2005, and as one tug history expert wrote: “that is the last that I have heard about her”.

After much sleuthing and a few fruitless phone calls, her ownership was traced to Liberty Oil & Refining Association, with offices in Las Vegas and West Palm Beach. In August 2024 the government database of vessels globally, Electronic Quality Shipping Information System, or equasis, lists the “Registered owner” of Ocean King, IMO #5260382, built 1945 since “before 2009” as “LIBERTY EXPLORATION INC” of Las Vegas. This firm contracted with the Bahamian government to prospect for oil off Walker’s Cay in 2005.

Liberty Oil’s principals are Kermitt Waters in Nevada and Carl Thornebrue in Florida. Established in 1979 by Waters, who has owned a law firm in Vegas for 30 years, their initial mandate was to explore for oil in the US, and they ventured into “airborne magnetometers …to locate a massive Jurassic reef …calculated to be 60 X 30 miles and 5,000 feet high.” With this they “applied to the Bahamas Government and [were] granted a licence which contained five blocks ten miles by ten miles each, with the total area of 500 square miles …..to drill three exploratory wells northwest and south of Walker’s Cay… to test for …commercial quantities of hydrocarbons ….[to] ….be converted to production wells”. Sounds convincing – except no exploration even took place.

Liberty Oil claimed to own a jack-up drilling rig Autumn Trader and an offshore supply boat Jim Gibson, and Ocean King Carina is in the paper trail, but aside from a few offhand comments it has not been possible to place this tug in the Bahamas. A characteristic of Liberty’s activities was the conspicuous absence of a tug when they most needed one.

Their 259-foot drill barge Louis J Goulet ran aground at Johnny’s Cay north of Hope Town. When Liberty Oil failed to pull it off the reef – because they could not procure the Ocean King or any tug, Larry Smith wrote that “two [drill permits] are held by Liberty Oil, but were suspended because of the company’s failure to remove a sunken vessel from an Abaco reef”.

In an open letter to Kermitt Waters in the December 1, 2005 Abaconian, Lory Kenyon of Hope Town to have a look. “If you are at all interested in seeing this damage for yourself, I will be happy to take you out to the reef ….I will even provide snorkel gear for you. What size fins do you wear?” she asked. He never took her and presumably went back to the desert to use their NASA-grade toys on a different government. Today their site is down, and their vessels are listed as ‘dead ships.’

If it ever arrived with Liberty Oil, Ocean King aka Carina appears to have never left the Bahamas, and is said to have entered the last stop before the ship knackers: the sand and aggregate business. This theory would find her shuttling barges to and from shallow sand banks to and from Nassau. One prospective owner/operator may be James Edgar Curling, from the seafaring family of Ragged Island, and a firm named Tycoon Management Company on Arawak Cay.

Despite many visits to Arawak Cay and friendly conversations there, nothing has been verified. In 2019, Tycoon is said to have “purchased approximately six tugs and barges for sand dredging operation.” A source said [Carina] “…could easily be one of these, [as] the availability of construction sand has moved further away from Nassau Harbour. After dredging by Rose Island for many years, they moved to Booby Rocks, and now the banks at Finley Cay.”

The present location of Carina, or Ocean King, afloat or asleep, remains a mystery. Probably one day a diver will uncover one of a wreck’s myriad names and post online about it, or this author or someone else, while walking the water front will see one of the monikers of the only surviving ship to see the last attack by a German U-boat in history.