‘Perry Mason Moment’ Reveals Ship’s Fatal Flaw, Despite Cover-Up

How My Testimony into the Marques Tragedy Changed the Regs

Roger Long Sep 12   ∙   Guest post

The author, a retired naval architect, is a frequent Loose Cannon contributor, having written about the loss of the Pride of Baltimore and Bayesian and the principles of vessel stability in general.

The news media was filled for days after June 3, 1984 with stories about the dramatic capsizing of a British sail training vessel on the first night of a race from Bermuda to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Nineteen people lost their lives when the Marques suddenly sank, including the Captain, his entire family, and two employees of Mystic Seaport Museum who were accompanying trainees in a museum sponsored program.

I followed the news with special interest because I was just wrapping up the largest survey and study of large sailing ship stability conducted up until that time. Thus began one of the most interesting episodes of my career as naval architect, even more memorable in my mind than my dive to the Titanic and subsequent analysis of her sinking.

I was vice-president of Woodin and Marean at the time, naval architects who were members of an industry/U.S. Coast Guard task force to develop new rules for U.S. sail training vessels. I was the principle investigator for the stability aspects of the project and had evaluated the stability of as many large sailing vessels as we could obtain information for. This effort has previously been described in the Loose Cannon piece Pride & Stability, Part 2: Author’s Career Trajectory Leads Directly to the Case.

One of the truly tragic losses in the accident was Susan Peterson Howell who was serving as the counselor for the group of sail training students from Mystic Seaport. She was the daughter of famed Maine yacht designer Murray Peterson and knew enough about boats and ships to find herself very concerned about the Marques when she boarded in Bermuda. She wrote her brother, Bill, shortly before sailing and indicated that she would have declined to participate in the voyage after seeing the ship if not for the responsibility she felt for the students.

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Her brother, also a naval architect, was testifying in the ongoing inquiry in London and had heard of our work. He hired us to evaluate the Marques and place her stability in the data base of world sailing vessels that we had produced for the sailing school vessel rule-making process.

There were no plans for the vessel. We did have many basic dimensions from official registration sources, plans for large ferro cement fuel and water tanks that had been installed in the bilge, and many photographs. I was able to produce a set of lines from these and create the same kind of computer model as I had for the other vessels in the U.S. Coast Guard study. We had the results of a stability test performed on the Marques during her conversion for movie production.

Applying the numbers from the stability test yielded pretty horrifying results. All the vessels on the graphs we constructed for the study were clustered up in the right hand corner. Way down at the bottom left were three ships that had capsized. The Marques landed right next to them with inches of blank space between ships that were still sailing and those which had capsized.

The personal computer was very new at the time. The term “PC” was only three years old and I was still learning that a printer might change something that looked right on the screen. There was some deadline, and I sent out a preliminary report to the London investigators without looking at the print outs which had changed the symbol for the Marques into something like #*&^$. The British investigators sent back a reply pointing out that we had sent them gibberish and claiming that our number for the center of gravity of the vessel was too high.

This was not a happy time at Woodin and Marean. Due to financial miss management and some bad decisions by Parker Marean, the president, I had not been paid in months. We disagreed about just about everything, and I would have been gone long before if not for wanting to see the design of the sailing hip Corwith Cramer through to the end. Parker looked at the British letter and said, “This is a disaster. I’ve got to tell Bill and the British that you are off the project and I’m taking over.”

At the same moment, I’m looking at the letter and, with my greater familiarity with the numbers and computer model, I can see that I have the British cold with their own numbers even if they did make the ship look a bit better than my initial calculation. Parker called up Bill Peterson and his lawyer and told them I was off the case. They told him that, if I was, he was also, and they would find another naval architect. Plans then began to be made for me to travel to London to testify in the official wreck inquiry. Bill and his lawyer declined to pay for Parker to come. He offered to pay his own way, and they told him that it would just complicate our presentation and that he was basically not welcome.

After my corrected report was sent to London, the British Department of Transport hired me as their consultant and established that I would be testifying in a status roughly equivalent to “Friend of the Court” in U.S. parlance.

We were a three-person team that traveled to London. Joining us was Buzz Fitzgerald, a lawyer who later became president of Bath Iron Works. I can’t think of anyone I ever worked with who had more integrity and good sense. He was a truly great man who, if not for a brain tumor, probably would have become governor of Maine and perhaps risen even higher. I learned as we flew over that the owner of the vessel was a cousin of the Queen and the entire British establishment had resisted any inquiry into the causes of the sinking.

The mother of one of the victims, Shirley Cooklin, had campaigned tirelessly but was unable to find a lawyer willing to take the case except for one civil-rights solicitor who had none of the background for such an undertaking.

I also learned that we would be staying at the Inns of Court, a unique British institution which is basically a large hotel complex for barristers and solicitors from all over the country to stay while courts are in session in London. Buzz told me that, as far as he knew, no one who was not a member of the British legal establishment, and certainly no foreigners, had ever stayed there.

Buzz told me that the British lawyer was letting us stay in his chambers as a poke in the eye of the establishment, which he felt was attempting to cover up the causes of the accident. The British are masters of expressing contempt and disapproval through icily correct politeness and the behavior of the staff at the Inns certainly supported that assessment.

Wreck Inquiry

The board for the wreck inquiry was composed of three men known as “assessors”. One was a naval architect and the other a master mariner. The chairman was a barrister. We learned shortly after arrival that the chairman and every lawyer for a party in what could be considered a defensive position—the owner, the insurance company, shipyards, etc.—all were in the same chambers, roughly the equivalent of a law firm in the US. Buzz said, “The fix is in.” He went on to say that, since everyone in the London legal system is a gentleman, they can be counted on to behave honorably and they therefore do not obsess about conflicts of interest as the U.S. legal system does. He then said, “Right.”

The British Department of Transport had its own reasons for being defensive. The vessel was operating under a Load Line Exemption Certificate. The department is empowered to issue these but the regulations and common sense say that you first evaluate the stability and other safety factors so that you know what you are exempting from and the level of risk. They didn’t do that and just issued the blank check. The only possible explanation is, “Oh, cousin of the Queen. You’re good to go. No bother with the expensive inspections and calculations.”

Mystic Seaport and the American Sail Training Association were unaware of the circumstances. They just knew that they were sending students on a ship that had an internationally recognized certificate of safety.

The stability test I referred to above was done by the naval architect who modified the vessel to be a film set. Either he or the former owner practically chained himself to the dock to prevent the vessel leaving on her first sail training mission, saying that she was dangerous and suitable only as a film prop. Interestingly, the Albatross, the other major sail training accident of the period was also a fore and aft rigged vessel decked out for movie production and then lost (after being disposed of and going into sail training).

In the Albatross case, the spars were oversize to look like a larger vessel in close ups. Plans for the rigging and spar dimensions of the Marques were not available but mention was made in earlier publicity that her rig could be made to look like that of vessels of different sizes and types for movie production.

We quickly learned after arrival that the British lawyer was way over his head and completely unprepared. He was a good and honorable man but simply operating with no budget in an area far from his special expertise. We were not suppose to have any contact or communication with him outside the wreck inquiry proceedings but Buzz and Bill were so incensed at the injustice that they perceived happening that we ended up having dinner with the lawyer every evening and spending the time after helping him prepare his case. There also a lot of dinner discussion between the two lawyers about the differences between the U.S. and British systems and listening to those discussions over the ten days was fascinating.

My testimony came early in the inquiry. Buzz had prepared me well and later said he had seldom seen anyone handle themselves better on the stand. I learned that, if the answer to a question was damaging to our position. to just quietly say, “yes” or “no” and let it go. If a question wasn’t clear, I should just make the points we wanted to make that were most closely related until the examiner said, “That’s not what I meant, let me rephrase.”

I floundered a lot the first day trying to get around that fact that the state of knowledge did not permit assigning a wind velocity to any particular wind-heel curve. (For a discussion of these curves, see Stability 9: Heeling Arm Curves.) The vessel owner’s lawyer kept implying that what I was really testifying to was that we didn’t know anything useful.

My one good moment that morning was when a lawyer presented nearly identical stability data for another vessel (the one used in the movie “White Squall”) and how far she had sailed without incident. He asked, “What would you say to the master of this ship?”

I said, “I would tell him, ‘This ship is going to kill you’.” Dramatic silence. No further questions.

Years later I related this to someone, and he said annoyed, “Yes, I flew all the way out to Australia to spend two weeks on that ship, and all I did was load iron and lead pigs into the bilge. We never left port. Thanks a lot.”

Just before a lunch break, I had a sudden epiphany that changed everything about the way I have approached stability since. It figured heavily in my discussions of the recent Bayesian capsize in this story: Bayesian Stability Calculus Suggests There Really Were Only Seconds To Save Lives. I drew a bunch of wind heel curves and the vessel’s righting arm on the blackboard while eating my sandwich and waited for the hearing to resume.

The Moment

The owner of the Marques returned from lunch, looked at the blackboard, and I could hear him groan contemptuously something like, “Oh God, what now?” My testimony began. I pointed at the wind heel curve that corresponded to a 10-degree heel angle and said (as best I remember):

“We all agree from other testimony that the vessel was heeling 10 degrees just before the sudden capsize. We don’t know what the wind velocity was. This curve could be full sail in a moderate wind or storm canvas in a strong wind, any combination of sail plan, wind, and course that produces a 10-degree heel. This righting arm curve is based on the center of gravity established by the British investigators and with which I agree. This other wind heel curve lies just above the entire righting arm curve and therefore represents a combination of forces that would capsize the vessel. This is also something on which we all agree.

We can not, at the current state of the art and the information available, assign a wind velocity to this curve. However, wind pressure varies as the square of the velocity. So, if we take the square roots of the upright values of these two curves, we can determine the difference in wind speed to take the vessel from the angle at which we know she was sailing at to the wind speed that would capsize her if immediate action was not taken to ease sheets or change course.”

I did the calculation and said, “So, the increase in wind speed necessary to capsize the vessel was only 22 percent. The speed increase of a strong gust on a blustery day is about 50 percent so this vessel was an accident waiting to happen and her eventual capsize was inevitable.”

The inquiry was being held in the impressive room where the House of Lords met during World War II. There were well over 100 people in the room. Buzz had instructed me that, if I got a chance to make a strong point like that, I should just freeze still until I heard a sound. I did. I have seldom heard such a silence. I stood with my chalk on the board for what seemed like a long, long time. When I finally heard stirring, I turned to see the owner of the vessel with his face in his hands. It was one of the most dramatic moments of my life.

The inquiry adjourned for the day and the naval architect on the board came up to me and said, “Marvelously clear. Wonderful.” He then invited us to a meeting of the Royal Society of Naval Architecture that evening. I was excited to go but Buzz said, “Oh, we can’t. It would be totally inappropriate. He knows it and knows that we know it. It was just a gesture.”

Buzz told me the next morning that I should not return to the remainder of the inquiry so as to appear uninterested. I was sorry to miss Bill’s and other’s testimony but got to spend a week enjoying London. During our flight back to the U.S., Buzz told me that I had to get loose from that loser Parker, and he would help me pro bono to extricate myself and get my own company started.

That was the beginning of Roger Long Marine Architecture, Inc. and my independent career. One of my first jobs was prompted by the discovery of the actual lines plan for the Marques. I was asked to redo all of my calculations using the now known actual shape of the hull and was pleased to discover that my reconstruction from all the bits and pieces of information at the beginning was so close that there was no significant change to my conclusions. I was the only person in the inquiry, other than Bill Peterson, who had testified that the vessel’s stability was in any way deficient.

The results of the inquiry eventually were published. As Buzz said, the fix was in. He said that, in the U.S., my testimony would have put the owner of the vessel in jail. Britain was not going to imprison the Queen’s cousin so the way they let him off was to basically say that, yes, the stability of the vessel was abysmal and she never should have been allowed to do sail training but only Roger Long could have known that due to his research into sailing vessel stability.

That certainly made me look good, but it was a miscarriage of justice. We had anticipated this and been careful in our testimony to point out that all of the methods we were using were described in “White’s Manual of Naval Architecture” published in London in 1877. They just conveniently overlooked that.

Even if the British regulators did not know of my research, the slightest curiosity about exempting the vessel from regulations should have gone like this:

Old vessel for carrying fruit modified with a larger rig and big deckhouses.

I wonder how much ballast needed to be added to compensate?

Oh, there’s no ballast at all!

Those ferro cement tanks could be considered ballast I wonder how much they weight?

Oh, that’s only a 12 percent ballast ratio. I wonder what is typical for vessels of this configuration?

Typical ballast ratio for vessels of that type is at least twice that much and often more.

Yikes! We’ve got to take a closer look at all this.

The amazing thing to me is that she made it all the way around the world in that condition but big ships are sailed very conservatively because the cook and others complain when there is water on the deck or much heel. Eventually though, the invisible fine margin between the rail cap going under and capsize will doom the vessel.

A philosophical question that came up in the aftermath of the hearing: If a building is knocked down by a tornado and later analysis shows that a 50 mph wind could have flattened it due to structural deficiency, was the tornado the cause and were the architect or builder at fault? Part of the rational for the inquiry findings was that the conditions were so severe that she would have gone over anyway (although no other ships did).

Much was made of the fact that the captain (the official one; not the sailing master) told the press that the U.S. Coast Guard training ship Eagle was knocked down to 55 degrees. If that could happen to such a mighty ship, who could blame the poor little Marques for lying down. Red Shannon, the sailing master, invited me aboard the Eagle rather strangely at an ASTA conference and gave me a tour.

In the middle of it, we stopped at a ring bolt on deck, and he whispered, “The water came right to there. I was watching.” The ring bolt was on the vessel plans we had. I went back and determined that the heel angle was only 25 degrees. Red didn’t want to embarrass the captain, but he wanted to be sure I had accurate information for my ongoing research.

This whole affair led to considerable additional research in England and the establishment of one of the best set of stability regulations for sailing vessels in the world. The wind heel curve comparison, without assigning wind velocity, which occurred to me in a flash of insight that morning, became an essential feature of those regulations.

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