This is a tale of mystery. It’s not a whodunit, but it does involve death, though not of a person but rather a ship. What you’re about to read is the culmination of a decade’s worth of research. I know what happened to Eliza Barss and I’m sharing her story for the first time in the very same magazine where this whole mystery began.
THE BEGINNING
Ninety-one years ago an article appeared in The Bermudian entitled “Cap’n Dixie: Master Mariner.” The author E.C. McLaughlin tells the story of an old man who loved a ship so intensely that he risked his own life to save her.
I stumbled upon this article in the spring of 2011. I was 21 years old, a new recruit at The Bermudian and unfamiliar with the magazine’s depth of archival history and how it was organised. I was perusing an old issue, looking for something I can’t now recall, when I discovered it. The article opened with an illustrated portrait of its subject, Dixie Cooper. His face was a friendly one, accented by a bushy moustache and deep-set wrinkles. This man, Dixie, was my great-great grandfather.
What I uncovered in that article was a chronicle of Dixie’s career from young seaman to fully fledged sea captain. It provided details of Dixie’s time aboard all of the ships he worked on, the most famous and fascinating of which was the barque Eliza Barss. The article ends with the surprising and tumultuous story of Dixie and Eliza’s final voyage together in 1889, the outcome of which was an abrupt end to both of their careers at sea.
What I didn’t know then was that this article was a catalyst and would be the start of one marvellous and arduous adventure, concluding with me at the bottom of Granaway Deep searching for the Eliza Barss.
MY GREAT-GREAT GRANDFATHER, DIXIE COOPER
Born Elliot Lincoln Butterfield Cooper in 1861 to parents Phares and Eudocia, Dixie was destined for a life at sea. His first voyage occurred at the tender age of eleven aboard his father’s ship, the Anne Seymour. In those days a maritime career was both a lucrative and well-respected one and Phares, it seemed, was hell-bent on giving his son an early start.
The voyage was an eventful one for young Dixie. A couple of days out of Bermuda, the Anne Seymour happened upon another ship, bottom up and bobbing at the surface of the water. The captain, eager to turn a profit for his ship’s owners, ordered his men to strip the copper sheathing from the upturned boat’s bottom. Dixie, not exempt from helping out, was sent to pull the copper nails from the ship’s hull. Tragically, several months later, after returning Dixie to Bermuda, Phares was lost at sea. As family lore goes, while engulfed in a wretched storm, Phares climbed one of the ship’s masts to untangle the sails when he was swept overboard. A ship would never have turned back in such conditions and so the Anne Seymour and its crew journeyed on without Phares.
It would be reasonable to imagine that the untimely death of his father would have deterred Dixie from pursuing a life at sea, but in fact, it had the opposite effect; Dixie resolved to follow in his father’s footsteps. Two years later, at the age of thirteen, he boarded the Bermuda-built brigantine Excelsior, on which he learned the art of handling a windjammer. Though the work was merciless, Dixie was resolute: if he was to one day become a master mariner, he needed to learn not just what it took to man a ship, but how to navigate one, too. After his time aboard the Excelsior, Dixie returned to school to learn more advanced arithmetic. Once he finished his studies, he joined the crew of a newly launched boat called Racer. While she proved to be a very fast vessel, she was far too small for trading and so she was sold to the government of British Guiana.
Fortunately for Dixie he was able to join the crew of Eliza Barss, a merchant vessel trading between New York and Bermuda. This marked a significant turning point in his career: Though he was only a seaman, to work aboard the Barss was to be stamped as a fully fledged sailor, and so, he chose to make the utmost of the experience. After several instructive years aboard, he left and joined the Maggie as an able seaman. Life was unpredictable aboard the Maggie, a two-masted schooner notorious for getting into trouble. On one voyage to Prince Edward Island shortly after Dixie joined her, she drove ashore in a heavy snowstorm. When the weather cleared, the lookout was shocked to see, not fifty feet away, a huge red barn—the Maggie was in the middle of farmland! Thankfully she was pulled back out at the next high tide and sent back out to sea. While onboard the Maggie, Dixie was promoted to mate and he held that capacity for more than a year before returning to the Eliza Barss in 1889, this time as her captain.
Oh, what joy he must have felt to finally achieve his boyhood ambition! To be a sea captain was already an immense feat, particularly for a man of only 28 years, but to be captain of Eliza Barss, that was truly something.
THE GOOD SHIP: ELIZA BARSS
Built in 1848 in either St. John’s, Newfoundland, or Eastport, Maine, (no one’s really sure which) Eliza Barss was known as both the fastest and ugliest ship working the route between New York and Bermuda. Weighing 205 tons, the Barss had a flat bottom, blunt bow and shallow draught, but her bizarre appearance was due to the fact that she was purpose-built for the cattle trade.
She had the capacity to carry 102 head of cattle: 70 on her main deck and an additional 32 below. Her four-footed passengers were mainly of the Texas longhorn variety, the majority of which had never been handled a day in their lives. In preparation for their voyage to Bermuda, they would travel to New York by railway car and once there, they would be driven into a pen and the whole pen would then be hoisted aboard the ship. On reaching Bermuda, they were unloaded, the method for which involved removing the railing around the cattle stalls and pushing the steers overboard! In 1950, William Oscar Wilkinson was quoted in the Royal Gazette as saying that it was “a common sight in Hamilton to see fifty head of cattle swimming ashore from the Eliza Barss.”
Transporting cattle live was essential in those days as refrigeration was simply not available. Once in Bermuda, the animals were slaughtered and fed to the two regiments and the detachment of artillery that then formed the regular garrison in Bermuda. But, as one can imagine, it wasn’t always easy caring for cattle at sea, and the crew of the Eliza Barss was often expected to act as bullfighters. Dixie himself had a scar after one incident when he was gored by a loose bull.
It’s important to note that Eliza Barss was a working ship for an exceptionally long time compared to other square-riggers like her. Stormy weather, heavy loads and mistakes in navigation made the life of a vessel unpredictable. But the Barss was different. Perhaps it was in her design and construction, or the aptitude of her captains and crew, but she was known in every port from New York to Cardiff to Bermuda as a stable and reliable craft, surviving a staggering forty-one years at sea.
There was one voyage in particular that cemented Eliza Barss’s status as a good ship: the time she beat the Canima. She departed New York one sunny Thursday afternoon (likely it was 1875, but we can’t be certain) in the company of the schooner- rigged passenger steamer Canima. The wind was dead fair for Bermuda and her captain, Henry Hilgrove Hollis, kept his expert eye at his top hammer to make sure that every stitch of the canvas was drawing to the utmost. Dixie was the youngest seaman on board and he, along with the rest of the crew, prayed fervently for the favourable breeze to last. It did. At 2:00 a.m. on Monday morning, three and a half days out from New York, the Barss was lying off St. David’s Head, waiting for daylight and a pilot boat. The Canima, despite her prestige and pretensions as the forerunner of a new age, did not appear on the horizon until three or four hours later, to the chagrin of her skipper and the supreme satisfaction of Captain Hollis and his crew.
In the 1850s, before Eliza Barss picked up her routine Bermuda–New York route, she’d take coal from Bermuda to Jamaica, and then collect sugar in Cuba and take it to New York where she’d load up her cattle. But cattle wasn’t all she’d bring home. Advertisements in the newspaper would announce Eliza Barss carrying pork, codfish, tobacco, whale oil, perfume, confectionery, books, cigars, ground coffee, and garden seeds. Seemingly there wasn’t anything the Barss couldn’t or wouldn’t transport. During the springtime she would take Bermuda-grown produce to New York where it was much appreciated as their climate meant their crops weren’t yet ready for harvest. On May 24, 1859, she reportedly took with her 1800 barrels of potatoes, 125 barrels and 800 baskets of onions, and 560 boxes of tomatoes! As C.F.E. Hollis Hallett notes in her book Rosabelle: Life in Bermuda in the Nineteenth Century, Bermuda’s early farming families like the Outerbridges and Watlingtons benefitted immensely from ships like Eliza Barss that could take their produce to international markets.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the Barss. On March 31, 1860, she arrived in Bermuda with a case of smallpox. The Royal Gazette reported that the Barss’s quarantine flag was raised and she was anchored off Long Point in Somerset. Governor Col. Freeman Murray issued a proclamation directing a general vaccination of those onboard, and the infected seaman was transferred to Hospital Island for treatment. After being thoroughly cleaned, Eliza Barss was bound for New York again less than a month later.
On October 3, 1867, the Eliza Barss was almost lost forever. According to a report published in The Royal Gazette, while she was docked at Pier 21 in Manhattan (where Battery Park is today) she caught fire. It seems the fire started among the hay and meal onboard which were stowed forward of the fore hatch. Though firemen reached her quickly, she filled with water and sank. A great effort was made to rescue her cattle but less than half were saved and, sadly, all of her sheep were lost. Thankfully, in the weeks after, she was raised and repaired, and she left New York for Bermuda in early December of that year. By now Eliza Barss was famous, and not just in Bermuda.
In April 1871, the New York Herald reported: “The well-known regular barque Eliza Barss, Nathaniel Vesey, master, left Bermuda February 25th, arrived at New York March 3rd, left New York March 11th, arrived off Chub Cut [Bermuda] March 16th and anchored in Hamilton Harbor noon of that day. This speaks well of the excellent seagoing qualities of the barque and the nautical ability of her young commander. The barque loaded a full cargo of cattle, under and upon deck, all in prime order.”
Later that year, it was reported in The Royal Gazette that Eliza Barss had completed the “shortest round voyage ever made by a sailing vessel between New York and Bermuda” the extent of which was just six days. Referencing the New York Herald’s earlier piece, the Gazette article closed with: “What will the Herald now say of the ‘smart young captain’ and the swift barque he commands?”
Thankfully for Eliza Barss and her crew, the years between 1868 and 1888 were ones of stability. She had a couple of minor incidents (a hurricane in 1874 during which she lost her deckload of hay, and a run-in with a tug in St. George’s in 1878 that fortunately resulted in only minor damage), but she was enjoying regular and fruitful voyages, and it seemed then that Eliza Barss was infallible.
That was until 1889.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE ELIZA BARSS
I wish I could tell you that Dixie and Eliza sailed off into the sunset together, finally reunited but that’s not what happened. By the time Dixie took command of Eliza Barss, she was an old girl and her decades at sea were beginning to show. But it wasn’t just age that plagued her, the introduction of refrigeration meant that steamships had robbed her of the cattle trade. Without a regular route, she was relegated to wandering the Atlantic on a never-ending quest for cargo.
Eliza Barss cleared St. George’s for the last time on August 10, 1889. Laden with sugar and bound for Queenstown, she would then make her way to Cardiff to load coal before journeying back to Bermuda. It was a strenuous voyage for the good ship and by the time she anchored in Cardiff, she was leaking badly. Dixie sent word to her owners telling them of the situation, and arrangements were made for her repair. On October 1st, she endeavoured to depart for Bermuda but had to turn back nine days later after her repairs were deemed insufficient. She was still taking on water and it was determined that in her state there was little chance she would survive the 3,300-mile voyage home.
Dixie was unsure what to do next. He received a message stating that Eliza’s owners were sending insurance surveyors to condemn her and prevent her from going back to sea. Instead she would be stripped and sunk in Cardiff, and Dixie and his crew would travel home aboard another ship. But Dixie simply wouldn’t allow it: Eliza Barss was a Bermuda barque. She’d serviced her island for decades and made men out of boys, just like him. No, he owed it to the Barss to get her home. If she was to die, she deserved to die in Bermuda.
The next morning before daybreak, he roused his disgruntled crew and ordered them to let go of the shorelines: Eliza Barss was going home. A tug led them through the locks and down the river and by the time the sun rose, she and her crew were clear of land. Their voyage home was a truly treacherous one. Dixie admitted that he and his crew had to pump Eliza every foot of the way in order to keep her afloat. But miraculously on December 17th, she arrived in Grassy Bay after a full thirty-seven days at sea. And in true Eliza fashion she held onto her cargo of coal, which reportedly could be seen glistening through her open seams.
This last home run killed the Eliza Barss. She was beached on an island in the Great Sound and the death of this once fast and famous sailing vessel signalled the end of an era for the island as a whole.
THE SEARCH
I refuse to label Dixie a hero and I’m certain no one else would choose to either. Deciding to sail the Barss home in such a state was reckless; in today’s world he might even be accused of gross negligence. Why then did he do it? What would drive him to accept such risk? And how could one ship stir this kind of passion in a man? I needed to understand it and in order to do that, I had to find out what happened to the Eliza Barss.
I turned to my mother, the keeper of the Cooper family history, and questioned her about what she knew of Dixie and Eliza. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much. Though she clearly remembers my grandfather, John Elliot “Shot” Cooper, speaking proudly of Dixie and Eliza Barss, there weren’t any specifics regarding what may have transpired after they returned to Bermuda.
I realised early on in my search for Eliza Barss that I needed expert help, the likes of which came from Dr. Philippe Rouja, who was and is still the custodian of historic wrecks in Bermuda. Philippe has worked for two decades cataloguing Bermuda’s shipwrecks; he’s starred in several shipwreck documentaries, and he co-led the excavation of the US Civil War blockade runner the Mary Celestia which wrecked off Bermuda’s south shore in 1864.
We met for the first time in the conference room at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. “Have you ever heard of the Eliza Barss?” I asked him. “Of course,” he replied. “She was famous.”
I presented him with the article I’d found and asked him if he knew what happened after Dixie beached her in the Great Sound. He thought for a moment before saying, “No, and I don’t remember Teddy [Tucker] ever saying so either.”
But something had to have happened. Did she sink? Was she pulled apart and sold in pieces? I was intent on finding out and I begged Philippe to help me. “I don’t want you to find her without me though,” I told him as our meeting came to a close. “I want to do the work.” He laughed before saying, “Don’t worry, you will!”
Looking back, I can’t believe that as inexperienced as I was then, I thought it might be easy. In reality, years went by before I found out anything of substance, but no matter how doomed my search seemed, I couldn’t let it go. I spent countless hours in the Bermuda Archives, and The Bermudian’s, too. I would find little snippets of information that at the time were exhilarating to uncover but functionally were pretty useless. Things like passenger lists and a captain’s name here and there. I thought I had finally got somewhere when I uncovered the name of Eliza’s owner. His name, I hoped, would lead me to insurance papers, which hopefully would tell me what they did with her after she was beached. There was one small problem, though. The owner’s name was George Somers Tucker. Imagine my search results! There were thousands.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
In late 2017, I struck gold. It came in the form of the Bermuda National Library’s Digital Collection which comprises over 28,000 digital copies of past and present local publications, including The Royal Gazette, the Bermuda Beacon, Bermuda Life and Times, and the Bermuda Recorder. Though I’d searched it several years before and uncovered nothing, on a whim I returned to it one day and what it revealed to me was more than 800 copies of The Royal Gazette in which the Eliza Barss was mentioned.
It took me the better part of a year to sift through them all, download each one and mark on it where the Eliza Barss appeared. Throughout that entire exercise I chronicled the life of Eliza, tracked every voyage she made, documented the goods she brought to Bermuda, the quantities of produce she took to New York, her triumphs, her tribulations, and her last and final voyage in detail.
I became an expert on the history of the Barss and though we knew her in very different ways, I grew to love her as much as I think Dixie must have. With as much passion as Dixie exhibited in his efforts to bring her home so, too, did I in piecing together her story.
THREE KEY PIECES OF EVIDENCE
Amongst the hundreds of documents I had compiled on Eliza Barss, there were three that supported us in making sense of her final days.
The first was a short article printed in The Royal Gazette on October 31, 1893. It described a party held at the Hamilton Princess. Though we can’t be certain, it alludes to the fact that Eliza was docked at the Princess and used as part of the night’s entertainment which included a nautical drill performed on her deck.
The second was published in the Gazette on April 28, 1896. It reads, “the steamboat Sylvia [is] lying alongside the hulk of the Eliza Barss at Salt Kettle.” A “hulk” is a ship that is afloat but not seaworthy.
The third and final piece of evidence was the most significant. Published in The Royal Gazette on March 4, 1924, it reads: “Unhappily she was burned in 1867 and her bones are lying near the Warwick shore between Little Turtle Bay and Salt Kettle.” The 1867 was obviously a typo, we can assume it was supposed to be 1897.
I sat for a long time with this piece of information. Finally I understood what happened to Eliza, but I couldn’t rejoice; it was not a celebration. Although I always suspected that she was likely sunk, seeing the proof of it hurt me. The ship I’d come to love so dearly, the one whose history I had traced, whose story I wanted to finish was set ablaze and she burned until she could no longer hold herself above the surface of the tide. Her lovely bones were at the bottom of Granaway Deep, and the only one who knew it was me.
“I know where she is,” I told Philippe finally. We were back in the boardroom at BUEI and this time I’d come armed with binders full of Eliza’s history. It happened a lot back then, he told me. Old hulks like that of the Eliza Barss were hazardous to other vessels, and so in the interest of public safety, they were often sunk.
“You know what’s funny though?” he said. ‘There is in fact a wreck there.”
THE CASE GIN WRECK
Sitting adjacent to Harbour Road, just north of Cave House, the Case Gin Wreck is that of an unknown early- to mid-nineteenth-century vessel that was burnt at anchor. Well known within Bermuda’s diving community, the wreck was surveyed by the British Sub Aqua Club more than a decade ago as part of a Nautical Archaeology Society training programme. According to the Bermuda Government, elements of the mystery vessel’s rigging can still be seen protruding from the sand at the wreck site, as well as sections of her wood hull and iron fastenings.
“There’s one thing though” Philippe said with trepidation. “The Case Gin Wreck got its name because there were so many gin bottles
found among the wreckage. Why would the Eliza Barss be carrying so much gin?” I thought back to the party at Hamilton Princess in 1893. Could it be?
We were getting to the end of our quest for Eliza Barss, all that was left to do was get in the water.
It was crucial that I see the Case Gin Wreck for myself.
FINDING ELIZA BARSS
Philippe and I began planning our dive to the Case Gin Wreck with the goal of determining whether it was actually the wreck of the Eliza Barss but Philippe expressed his hesitancy at being the only one to make that determination.
“It was once fashionable for shipwreck archaeologists to identify wrecks as belonging to certain ships,” he told me. “One would say, this was Blackbeard’s ship, and another would say I’ve concluded that this here is Captain Morgan’s.” But it was all for naught, he explained, because time would go by, and another archaeologist would research the same wreck and determine that the initial identification was incorrect. That, explained Philippe, is why shipwreck archaeologists today exhibit caution. For that reason, Philippe invited someone else to join our dive. That someone is none other than diving legend and shipwreck historian Dr. Edward Schultz.
Ed spent his professional life working as the chief of ER at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. It seems, though, that any time he wasn’t working, he was diving Bermuda’s wrecks and reefs looking for lost ships and ageing bottles. He was a member of the dive crew on Harry Cox’s Shearwater and Teddy Tucker’s Miss Wendy. I’ve come to know Ed throughout this journey, and I can tell you that his passion for discovering and preserving Bermuda’s maritime history is both admirable and infectious. With Ed on our side, I had no doubt that we’d be able to accurately determine whether we’d found Eliza Barss or not.
We boarded Philippe’s Boston Whaler at noon on a sunny day in early April 2024. The ride to the dive site was a short one, but it gave me enough time to settle in and make peace with my nerves. Though I was hopeful, the chance that the Case Gin Wreck wasn’t Eliza Barss was possible.
“What’s your goal today?” Philippe asked me as we arrived at the dive site. It was hard for me to answer that question because what I wanted was simple: I wanted to dive the Eliza Barss, not the Case Gin Wreck. I wanted these remains to be hers. With nothing left to do or say, I suited up and descended slowly into the water.
At first, I confess, I didn’t see much, but that happens sometimes with wrecks. The conditions weren’t ideal, and it was difficult to see more than ten feet ahead but as I headed west towards Spithead, the wreckage of an old square-rigger revealed herself to me. Standing tall even after a century underwater were her ribs. They were at least 10-feet tall and deeply embedded into the sand and rock they long ago sank upon. Curving outwards in a U-shape it was easy to envision the size and shape of the vessel they once held. Were these the ribs that once held onto cattle? Were they the same ones that sank to the bottom of the Hudson River? Were these the lost bones of the Eliza Barss?
In that moment I felt as though I was visiting the grave of a loved one, which was true in a sense although not someone, instead something. Before heading back to the boat, Philippe showed me what he believes to be the ship’s keelson. The most significant part of any ship, the keelson, acts as a ship’s backbone and as Philippe told me later, the keelson usually survives the longest underwater because it gets buried beneath the larger part of the vessel and thus is protected from tube worms and salvaging. I couldn’t help myself; I reached out and grabbed hold of it. If this was the wreck of the Eliza Barss, I was holding onto the most significant part of her.
Upon surfacing, Philippe turned to Ed: “What do you think?” he asked him.
Ed paused briefly before saying, “Taking in all of what you’ve learned, and knowing what we do about this wreck, it all makes sense. We know that Eliza Barss had a straight-edged stern, which wasn’t typical for that time period. I believe the stern at this wreck site sits to the west as this part of the wreckage has the same appearance. We could confirm this if we could locate the gudgeons or pintles from the rudder but these were likely salvaged long ago, especially if they were bronze which would have been probable considering when she was built. I’m also sure that the large capstan in the bow, which appears in many period images of Eliza Barss correlates with the large structure located amidships at the east end of the wreck.”
“Does that mean the Case Gin Wreck is now the wreck of the Eliza Barss?” asked Philippe.
I held my breath.
“Yes,” Ed concluded. “It has to be the Eliza Barss. Although there are several other shipwrecks on the sea bottom between Salt Kettle and Spithead, none even come close to fitting the description of the Eliza Barss. By process of elimination it has to be her.”
And with that, the search for Eliza Barss was over.
on the day they first dove the Eliza Barss
THE END
Shortly after returning Eliza Barss to Bermuda, Dixie retired from his life at sea. In actual fact, he never left the island again. He came close, just once.
After retiring from his position as the Sergeant-at-Arms at the House of Assembly, he was asked to man the British brigantine Jeanette which had arrived in Bermuda with a mate who was ill. Though Dixie initially agreed to the job, on his way to the agent’s office to sign the articles, he stopped to look up at the 800-ton vessel and experienced a premonition of sorts. Instead of signing the documents, he apologised profusely and said he’d changed his mind. Eventually Jeanette left Bermuda bound for Honduras. Dixie’s instinct proved right: Jeanette never made it to Honduras, and she was never heard from again.
I never imagined it would take me a decade to find the Eliza Barss, but in a way, I’m grateful it did. It gave me time to get to know her, and Dixie, and myself. I think Eliza played her role in helping shape Dixie. And she helped to shape me, too.
Philippe and Ed agree that likely there are countless other ships just like the Eliza Barss, ones that lie on our ocean floor waiting to be found.
I wonder whose ships they were…and who’s going to be the one to find them?
