The New Yorker:

The Fantome had been all about bare feet and rum swizzles. Why did it set sail in the Atlantic’s worst storm in centuries?

By John Vaillant

Windjammer Barefoot Cruises has been a fixture in the Caribbean for nearly half a century. Like most of its younger competitors, Windjammer specializes in waterborne escapes from the developed world. Unlike the clientele of more traditional cruise lines, however, Windjammer’s passengers travel under sail in massive pleasure yachts, most of which have been salvaged from the fallen empires of early-twentieth-century industrialists, financiers, and nobility. The Windjammer code on these voyages is informal, fun, and benignly piratical; onboard, bare feet and rum swizzles are the order of the day. The crews are island-born and friendly; when other Windjammer vessels are encountered, mock battles ensue, complete with cannon fire.

Windjammer’s founder and sole owner is Michael Burke, who, with the help of his family (he has six children, and they are all in the business) and hundreds of West Indians, purchased, rebuilt, and launched the largest fleet of sailing ships in the postwar world and—most remarkable—made it profitable. During the fifty-odd years he has been sailing in the Caribbean, Captain Burke, who is seventy-five, has emerged as a founding father of the South Florida, sailor-party-animal life style that Jimmy Buffett popularized in his songs. The Captain’s current fleet boasts six ships, which sail between the Lesser Antilles and the Yucatán year-round. Last year, some twenty thousand customers booked passage with the company, which is based in Miami Beach. This pattern was interrupted on October 27, 1998, when Hurricane Mitch, the most destructive storm to hit the Caribbean in more than two centuries, overtook the company’s flagship, the Fantome, resulting in the Atlantic’s worst sailing accident in more than forty years.

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