Remembering the ‘Snowboy’ tragedy

Yesterday, July 1, marked the 60th anniversary of the Snowboy tragedy.

The boat carrying dozens of fishermen, along with the crew, set out from Kingston Harbour on that date in 1963, destined for the Pedro Cays. It never arrived at its destination, and only a few items from the vessel were ever found floating at sea, all but confirming that it had sunk and with it the lives of all those on board.

The Gleaner covered this tragedy extensively at the time, and that coverage partly informed subsequent reporting done in the aftermath over the ensuing years.

Journalist Earl Moxam, a relative of some of those who perished on Snowboy, has reported extensively on the tragic incident. He eventually carried that reporting over into his recently published book, ‘Vantage Point Jamaica: A Reporter’s Chronicle’.

Below is an excerpt on the Snowboy tragedy from the relevant chapter in that book.

The Snowboy Story: An Intimate Portrait

By Earl Moxam

It was 6 p.m. on Monday, July 1, 1963 that the 63 ft boat, The Snowboy, set out from Zero Processing Wharf in Kingston Harbour, destined for the Pedro Cays. The boat, with approximately 40 men (five crewmen and 35 fishermen) on board, had been expected to reach its destination eight hours after it departed. The last radio contact with it was at 10 p.m., four hours after its departure.

Five days later, on July 5, The Gleaner newspaper published the first report of an unfolding tragedy:

‘FORTY MISSING ON FISHING BOAT; ‘SNOWBOY’ NOT HEARD FROM SINCE MONDAY NIGHT’

Over the course of the next week, the reality sank in: The Snowboy had gone to the bottom of the sea and with it, the lives of 39 Jamaicans and their Australian captain, and with them, the hopes and dreams of scores of spouses, children and communities across the island.

It took some time for the country at large to be made aware of what had happened, but in the sleepy fishing village of Treasure Beach in St Elizabeth, unimaginable pain had been awakened in the bosoms of those who held them most dear.

Based on my own experience of other such losses over subsequent years, I imagined that the news back home in Treasure Beach induced a relay of grief, with screams of agony echoing from Billy’s Bay in the west, to Frenchman, on to Calabash Bay and bouncing against the bluff at Great Bay at the eastern end of this tight-knit enclave.

It turned out that the largest concentration of fishermen lost on the boat was from this community: John Hill, Kern Hill, Truman Hill, Haldon Hill, Samuel James, Manola Myers, John Gordon, Aubrey Crowe, Avery Crowe, Oliver Moxam, Vernal Moxam, Cleve Gordon, Errol Whittaker, Harvey Ebanks and Clifton Parchment.

There were three from Bluefields in Westmoreland: Selvyn Brissett, Simeon Reid, and ‘Juvenile’. Sam Lee was from Montego Bay, and two men, Simeon Brown and Herbert Dawson, were listed as being from Port Antonio, Portland.

The other Jamaicans were said to be from various parts of Kingston: Joe Richardson, Ashley Forbes, Sidney Clarke, Lynval Beckford, Endrey Downer, ‘Crane’, Terrence Ebanks, and Lennard Wright. It was likely, however, as with some of the men from Treasure Beach, that not all the others given Kingston addresses were originally from the capital.

The captain of the ill-fated boat was L.G. O’Toole, a former officer of the Royal Australian Navy.

UNCHAINED GRIEF

Reporters from The Gleaner were early on the scene in Treasure Beach, making the unfamiliar trek to this then largely unknown rural outpost, to capture the unchained grief of residents and produce little sketches of the lives of these young men who had so suddenly been snatched away from their loved ones.

This would indeed be one of the earliest mentions of the name Treasure Beach in the national press, locked off as it was from outside attention. Three decades earlier, in 1934, The Gleaner had had reason to report on another tragic event in the community: the deaths of two teenage brothers, Melville and Ervin Parchment, struck by lightning, along with their big sister who barely survived. Back then, however, the community was known simply as Pedro, a cut-out from the wider Pedro Plains, which only acquired the name Treasure Beach a few years later with the establishment of the hotel from which the name was derived.

Mazie Swaby was only six years old in 1934, but the blood curdling screams of the Parchment family that day drifted down to her home in Billy’s Bay, half-a-mile away. She never quite got over that sound. Now, aged 35 and carrying me; her eighth child, six months into the pregnancy, Mazie was not half-a-mile away from this tragedy; she was in the midst of it in Sandy Bank.

Immediately beside our home at the foot of Moxam Hill (which overlooks the modern Treasure Beach Sports Park) was that of Audrey Crowe, mother of Aubrey. Miss Audrey was the granddaughter of John Moxam, the younger sibling of my great grandfather Richard ‘Sonny’ Moxam. She was inconsolable. The loss of her firstborn, only 16 years old, was almost too much to bear, even for those, like my mother, who heard her anguished shrieks and shared her maternal pain.

“Mommy, ah gone. Ah coming back in August,” the grief stricken mother recalled of her final conversation with her son who would not be able to fulfil that promised return.

The spine of the hill, from one end to the next, was occupied by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Sonny and Louisa Moxam. Immediately above Miss Audrey’s home, the news team visited Doris Moxam, pondering the loss of husband Oliver. She lamented the fact that she had not had the chance of a proper goodbye, an added source of pain with which she would have to live for the rest of her life.

Many years later, my mother told me of her own final exchange with Oliver which perhaps explained that lost final moment between him and his wife. A few weeks earlier he had just missed the truck transporting another set of fishermen to Kingston to embark on a similar fishing trip because he was tending his cows when the truck passed. This second opportunity was not to be missed so he dropped everything he was doing and ran when he heard that the vehicle was approaching the pick-up point on the main road.

My mother happened to be harvesting peas close to the fence as he hurried by and breezily shouted, “Ah gone dis time, Maze!”

Little did Oliver know how final that goodbye would turn out to be!

He had been a firm favourite of my parents. Ironically, he was very different from my dad, his first cousin. Much more carefree and gregarious than Daddy, he did not miss an opportunity to have a good time at the corner shop, which shared a fence with our home. Each day, as the shadows fell with the setting of the sun, he and other young men, including Raleigh Senior and my uncle, Whitworth, would fire up the jukebox, as they indulged in song, dance and drink. Whitworth had gained the nickname Stagalee, in honour of the song which he demanded of the jukebox most often during those nights of fun.

THE WORST WAS FEARED

Immediately above Oliver’s house was that of his uncle, Eustace. Inevitably, he was called Uncle Tas. The reporters walked through his home, past the graves of Sonny and Louisa, safely removed from the unfolding grief, and into the home of another despairing couple, another of my grand-uncles, Richard (‘Uncle Chaddie’), and his wife Mary. They were the parents of Vernal, nicknamed Mac.

Mac’s story was particularly poignant. He had been a member of the Windrush generation of Jamaican migrants who had gone to Britain, seeking their fortune in the ‘Mother Country’. He, like many others, had found the going tough in the UK, and after a decade there, decided to return to his homeland and start over. He had barely landed in Jamaica, leaving his wife and four children behind for the moment, when he got wind of the Snowboy trip. This sounded like a grand opportunity for the fresh start that he was seeking. So, Uncle Chaddie and Sta Mary had hardly a chance to catch up with their beloved son before he was gone on another boat, this time to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.

Grandpa Norman was next in the line of Moxam siblings along that spine. In 1927 he had felt the pain of losing a brother at sea on the ship taking him back to Jamaica from Cuba. Hubert, the first child of Richard and Louisa to survive childbirth, was 39 years old when he died on that journey home, his body taken off the ship in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland and buried in a nearby cemetery.

Now it fell to Norman to console another brother, Richard, a quiet, gentle tailor, always whistling a tune as he worked away at the machine on his veranda in the years that followed.

Half a mile to the west, Ethline Parchment was making the latest entries in her journal. With the surrounding hills echoing to the anguished cries from all around, she made that fateful entry; Snowboy had disappeared; the worst was feared.

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