Clipper ship in storm12/13/2023 (The company also wanted to limit its losses the Fantome, which was valued at fifteen million dollars, was not insured.) The strategy backfired when lawyers and investigators showed up, telling the bereaved families that they could win damage awards of a million dollars apiece. Although Windjammer did want to give the families something to live on, it apparently believed that by acting quickly it could avoid more negative publicity and a costly settlement. The Death on the High Seas Act (dohsa), a United States federal law, requires a shipowner to compensate a dead crewman’s family for wages he would have earned had he worked a normal life. Except for a number of life jackets, life rafts, and fragments of woodwork from the deck, no sign of the ship has been found. The search for the Fantome lasted for three weeks and covered more than a hundred and forty thousand square miles. Mentions that Guyan’s fiancee saw his ghost for several nights thereafter. Soon after the Windjammer main office lost touch with the ship, a meteorologist flying in a hurricane-reconnaissance plane registered a gust of two hundred and eight miles an hour-the highest wind speed ever recorded with scientific instruments in a hurricane. But, mostly, things just fly apart as if they had been caught up in some sort of cataclysmic tantrum. These explosions of localized energy cause unlikely juxtapositions of objects to occur: hardwood broom handles are impaled by shards of Plexiglas trees are pierced, dartlike, by the quills of parrot feathers a magazine can be left on a table, undisturbed, while the building around it is tossed away like a straw hat. When a hurricane grows as powerful as this, it will actually carry tornadoes inside it. By October 26th, Mitch had been upgraded to a Category 5 storm, with winds in excess of a hundred and eight m.p.h. As Mitch upgraded, passengers and nonessential crew were let off in Belize, and the ship, with thirty crew, struck out for open water to avoid the storm. Many of Windjammer’s captains have been from the British Isles, but Guyan was the youngest. Tells about the English captain of the Fantome, Guyan March. Writer tells about the categorization of hurricanes. Tells how hurricanes are formed from tropical depressions arising from so-called African waves in the eastern Atlantic. Tells the history of the seventy-two-year-old two-hundred-and-eighty-two-foot-long four-masted schooner, originally built for the Italian navy, then turned into a yacht by the Duke of Westminster, then sold to Aristotle Onassis, and thereafter to Michael Burke of Windjammer Barefoot Cruises. The disaster was the Atlantic’s worst sailing accident in over forty years. ANNALS OF DISASTER about the sinking of the Fantome, a Caribbean pleasure cruiser during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and the subsequent lawsuit.
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