My Life at Sea

By William Phares Dukeshire and Elizabeth Burr

William (Bill) Phares Dukeshire (1920-2016) was a mere twenty-three years old when he started his fateful voyage on the Kirkwood, a cargo ship delivering 10,000 tons of gasoline to an Allied commander in North Africa. After a severe storm injured the chief mate, Bill took on that role for the returning voyage. When a German U-boat torpedoed the Kirkwood near St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic, there was no way to preserve the ship. Bill's only hope was to command a lifeboat in order to get his crew the 800 miles northwest to Ascension Island. With no chronometer, Bill had only latitude coordinates to make the journey. Bill's memoir chronicles a life of fifty-four years at sea, from a stint on the troop ship SS Coamo to earning a Silver Star for his acts of heroism. Black-and-white photographs, certificates, a crewlist, a chart, and a lifeboat voyage bring his story to life in a book that will entertain and inspire any nautical enthusiast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Burr
• Release date: May 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781634893480

Book preview

My Life at Sea

My Life at Sea

A Memoir

William Phares Dukeshire

Edited by

Elizabeth Geraldine Burr

MY LIFE AT SEA © copyright 2020 by Elizabeth Geraldine Burr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, by photography or xerography or by any other means, by broadcast or transmission, by translation into any kind of language, nor by recording electronically or otherwise, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN 13: 978-1-63489-347-3

eISBN: 978-1-63489-348-0

24 23 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1

Cover photo. William Phares Dukeshire, Alice McDonald, 2001, oil on canvas, 19.5 × 29.5 in. The ship in the painting is a schooner that was commanded by Dukeshire’s grandfather, Captain Phares E. Dukeshire, in the early 1890s. The land behind the ship is Haiti.

Poem. Majestic Sea, copyright © 1980 by Captain W. Phares Dukeshire

For the scores of young ships’ officers to whom Bill served as mentor, honing their skills in all aspects of navigation and seamanship

Contents

Editor’s Foreword

Introduction

1. The Early Seafaring Days

2. The Coamo and the May

3. The Kirkwood

4. The Lifeboat Voyage

5. Ascension Island

6. Our Return to the United States, Awards, the Death of Captain Olsen

7. Salvage Work and My Life with Margaret

Appendixes

1. William Phares Dukeshire: Partial Record of Sea Service

2. Crew List for Lifeboat #2

3. Log of Lifeboat #2

4. Lifeboat Navigation Summary

5. Glossary

Notes

Majestic Sea

Editor’s Foreword

Captain William Phares Dukeshire wrote this narrative in the first person, as it is presented here. At his request and with the help of an anonymous consultant, I have copyedited the text without making any substantive changes. Phares (the name family members and relatives knew him by) was my mother’s first cousin. Because he and my mother were devoted friends from childhood until her death in 2012, I also grew to know and love him during his later years. The last time I spent with Phares was in July 2015, when I visited him at his home in Danielson, Connecticut, thirteen months before he died in August 2016 at the age of ninety-six. He and I shared the same birthday (January 18) thirty years apart. Except in this foreword, Captain Dukeshire will be called Bill, as he was known to his colleagues, friends, and acquaintances apart from family.

Phares was a great storyteller, and the stories he told of his adventures at sea were riveting. When he showed me the manuscript on which this autobiographical account is based, the incident that most caught my attention was the torpedoing of the ship on which he was serving as chief officer by a German U-boat in the South Atlantic Ocean during World War II. After the ship sank, he commanded one of four lifeboats, all of which succeeded in reaching Ascension Island safely. Sailing separately from the other three lifeboats, Phares was able to use ancient principles of navigation to bring his lifeboat and personnel to their destination without incident. This memorable event is the centerpiece and climax of the story told here.

When Phares passed away, as mentioned above, some polishing of his text remained to be done; in the process a few explanatory comments needed to be added, which are clearly indicated, for example, in footnotes. With the consultant’s help, however, I was able to complete the necessary preparation for publication of the author’s text, to which we now turn.

My Life at Sea

Full Page Image

Introduction

My paternal grandfather, from whom I received the middle name Phares, was a professional seafarer who rose through the ranks to become captain of his own ship, a three-masted schooner. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, my father chose to become a physician, making his mark by rising to prominence in that profession. Nonetheless, when my twin brother and I were just six years old, our father bought us a thirteen-foot, clinker-built, sloop-rigged wooden boat. We both learned to sail at that age and developed an affinity for sailing that lasted our entire lives. With me, it also aroused whatever yearning I may have inherited from my grandfather that caused me to choose a career at sea. Whereas my brother, Paul, chose a career in business, I turned toward seafaring, first by attending high school at the Admiral Farragut Academy in Toms River, New Jersey, where my initial training was aboard a square-rigged, three-masted ship, the Joseph Conrad, and then through service as a cadet and in other ratings on commercial vessels trading internationally. Eventually I achieved the knowledge and skills, acquired the requisite time at sea, and passed the exams necessary to become a professional ship’s officer.

William Dukeshire, April 1936, Admiral Farragut Academy, Toms River, New Jersey. Dukeshire was 16 years old.

William Dukeshire, April 1936, Admiral Farragut Academy, Toms River, New Jersey. Dukeshire was 16 years old.

My professional seafaring career on commercial vessels actually began when I was seventeen as a cadet on a Robin Steamship Lines cargo ship sailing from New York to South and East Africa and back. Over the next several years, after completing my training at the Admiral Farragut Academy, I obtained and advanced my deck officer licenses to the levels of Third Mate, then Second Mate, then Chief Mate, and finally, in 1946, achieving the ultimate recognition for any seafarer, I obtained my license as Master of Ocean Steam and Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons upon Oceans. During the subsequent years, I added some inland pilotage qualifications to that unlimited master’s license, most notably pilotage for the Mississippi River. During the last fifteen years of my seafaring career, I served as master of various vessels operated by Cross Sound Ferries out of New London, Connecticut. Before that, during my blue water or deep sea service, I had served on numerous cargo and some passenger ships sailing to many areas of the world, including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, around Africa, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Red Sea, and the Middle East. In the mid-1960s, I served on ships that sailed to Japan and Vietnam; and between 1968 and 1975, I commanded large salvage ships conducting marine salvage operations throughout the Western Hemisphere and offshore as far as the Azores.

From the end of February 1942 until late June 1942, I served as third mate on the SS Coamo, a troop ship. Less than six months after I left that ship to join another one, the Coamo was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic, and the entire crew went down with the ship. I often recall that disaster in light of my fortuitous decision to change ships. The ship that I joined after the Coamo was the SS May, on which I served for three months. This was a cargo ship—we loaded it with coal at Mobile, Alabama, and delivered the cargo to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When we were told that the May would be converted to a wartime ship, I was reassigned to the Liberty ship SS Samuel Jordan Kirkwood as second mate.

But the high point of this memoir of my sailing life is an incident that occurred when I was chief mate on the SS Samuel J. Kirkwood in May 1943. I had been serving on the Kirkwood since Christmas Eve of 1942 under Captain Samuel Olsen. We had a total crew of more than seventy men, which included a United States Navy armed guard. Our route had taken us from New Orleans to the Panama Canal, then down the west coast of South America to Cape Horn, from there across the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope —and thence to Durban, South Africa, from Durban to the Red Sea and Port Suez in Egypt, and finally back to Durban before returning home. While anchored in Port Suez, we enjoyed a brief sojourn in and around Cairo. Then, after unloading our cargo at Durban and taking on fresh stores, we embarked on our