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4:30 a.m.The storm that has buffeted the sail-training ship Marques for the last 14 hours appears to be subsiding. Most of the crew are below, sleeping peacefully...
Suddenly, a heavy gust of wind pushes Marques down on her starboard side. Then, as helmsman Philip Sefton, 22, recalls "a freakish wave of incredible force and size," literally slams into the ship, knocking her far over, flat on her side.
Water starts roaring through the open hatchway, down into the bowels of the ship. And in less than 45 seconds (approximately the time it will take you to read all the words on this page), the ship is gone - as she literally sails under the ocean, her cabin lights still glowing green through the water as she slides, into the depths. In under a minute, all that remains of Marques, are the few cold, shocked survivors, struggling for the liferafts. And then, the red rockets arcing through the stormy, pre-dawn sky. Of the 28 on board, there are nine survivors...
Said John Ash, 24, of the rogue wind and wave that drove the Marques into the sea: "It meant to kill us. There was nothing we could do."
Marques was originally built in Valencia, Spain for the Canary Island fruit trade in 1917. Originally a polacca-rigged brig, the ship was purchased in 1971 as a rotting hulk by Robin Cecil-Wright and restored over the next five years in Britain. The ship acquired her distinctive barque rig when she was extensively refitted and modified to play the role of Charles Darwin's HMS Beagle in the 1977 BBC television series "The Voyage of Charles Darwin".
Tall Ships in today's world are notoriously expensive to keep and over the years, besides serving as a sail-training ship for the British China Clipper Society, the barque earned her way with numerous TV and movie roles. Among them: "The Onedin Line", "Poldark", "The Fight Against Slavery", "The Master of Ballantrae" and "Dracula".
When lost, Marques was one of 39 ships engaged in the Bermuda-Halifax leg of the biennial Cutty Sark Tall Ships Race and had already won the first, six ship, leg of the competition from San Jaun, Puerto Rico to Bermuda. Following the ship's loss a formal inquiry into the loss of the ship was held by the British Department of Transport. One result of this investigation was a Code Of Practice for the Safety of Sail Training ships operating under the British flag. These new regulations came into effect in January 1991 and cover everything from ship construction and stability to safety equipment and crew requirements.
This model was commissioned as a Christmas gift for a former crew member by his wife. Of course, the hardest thing was finding anything on the ship for she seemed to have disappeared in the intervening years as completely as she sank. No reference work listed anything on her nor could I even find her basic dimensions. How long was the ship? What was it's beam? If I knew even the waterline length, I could calculate the height of the masts and rest of the dimensions using a calculator and simple ratios. Finally, a intense search of the Internet turned up the shipyard that had converted her back in the 1970's into HMS Beagle and from them I was able to obtain her basic dimensions via e-mail. With these, smuggled photocopies of the former crewman's precious photo album, and prints of microfilm newspaper and magazine accounts of the disaster a set of plans was drawn up, model size. And at last construction could begin...
Model ship photos & text © D.S. Smith 2003
Masts & Spars..... . ..
Rigging..... .......
Sails...
Ugly Duckling.........
......to a Swan. ..
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