Off Cape Fear

Waves tearing across her deck, the yacht Amphitrite hung on a sand bar off the Carolina coast. Her captain and owner, 40-year-old Samuel Luttrell II, ordered all hands into their 16-ft. lifeboat. With his wife Kathleen, their twelve-year-old son Samuel III and six crew members, he put out into the darkening sea. Just before they cast off, someone grabbed two metal ice trays from the yacht and carried them into the boat.

The ice cubes turned out to be the only source of water they had. The inexperienced crewmen could not row back to the Amphitrite. Neither could they make the shore. Pushed by the current and the 40-m.p.h. gale from the northeast, they drifted helplessly southwestward, parallel to the shoreline.

Into the Rough Atlantic. Just a few weeks before, the Amphitrite's trip had begun like a vacation cruise. Sam Luttrell, a retired Army officer in business in the Virgin Islands, had bought the yacht, a 96-ft. converted subchaser, at a Long Island shipyard. He hired an ex-Air Force officer from Miami for his navigator, and took on four Puerto Ricans as hands. With Gustave Frazer, a brawny Virgin Islander who worked for Luttrell, as engineer, the Luttrell family and their crew set out on a leisurely sea trip back to St. Thomas. They headed south via the sheltered passages inside the Atlantic coastline. One morning last week, the ship chugged down Bogue Sound into the rough Atlantic, just off the North Carolina shore. The navigator set a compass course southeastward towards St. Thomas.

Long before sunset, the sky went black from a gathering northeaster. When the Amphitrite sprang a leak, Luttrell pointed her back to shore. But the rising gale was too much for the two large engines. Crippled and off her course, the Amphitrite hit a sand bar near the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

What happened after that, only Gus Frazer, hurt and exhausted in a Charleston, S.C. hospital bed, was alive this week to tell.

"He Cry & Cry." In the first 24 hours in the lifeboat, the Puerto Ricans panicked and drank seawater. The next day all four died. Ships passed the lifeboat, which was in the middle of the steamer lanes, but none saw it.

On the third day the navigator died. He too had drunk sea water. "He go crazy," said Gus, "he scream and jump overboard." Sam Luttrell covered his wife and son with his trench coat, lay on top of them to shield them from the freezing spray. On the fourth morning, shivering in a sweatshirt and dungarees, Kathleen Luttrell, who had once danced in the Ziegfeld Follies, died. Her husband did not last long after. "The little boy Sammy," Gus said sobbing, ". . . all last night he cry and cry for his mamma and papa. He lay on them and cry. I cry too."

On the fifth afternoon a lookout on the minesweeper U.S.S. Token spotted Gus Frazer, unconscious, sitting upright in the boat, his hand still near the tiller. Sammy, still alive, died half an hour after his rescue. His parents' bodies were still in the boat.

When the Amphitrite's lifeboat was hauled into the Charleston docks, six waterlogged life-jackets lay inside. Two oars were underneath the seats. A single blue canvas sneaker bobbed in the salt water that covered the bottom of the boat, occasionally bumping into the metal ice trays, which gleamed dully in the bilge.

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