Joe went to America in June with Estelle IV, which had been rebuilt for the 1930 Harmsworth, and Estelle V, a twenty-eight-foot hydroplane. Again she was the only British entrant. She did not attend her own send-off party, a dance on a steamer down the Thames hosted by Ruth Baldwin. ‘This will be my third attempt,’ Joe announced on reaching the United States, ‘and if I do not succeed this time I shall pack it up. Motorboat racing is too expensive to carry on indefinitely.’ She was bullish with reporters. ‘I want to be treated as a man,’ she told one. ‘I don’t want any allowances made because I’m a woman.’
At the trials on Lake Muskoka in July Estelle V broke the American record with a speed of 94.5mph (the world record set by Segrave stood at 98.76mph). But in the race on 1 September, watched by the largest crowd ever gathered for a sporting event, both Joe’s boats broke down. At the end of the race she climbed out of her boat and spat. ‘Well, you’d better get a good look at me,’ Joe told the waiting reporters, ‘because I am not coming over again. It’s too frightfully expensive.’ (Since she was renowned for her uninhibited language, it is possible that this last phrase was cleaned up for publication.) Joe had spent about $500,000 in her several attempts at the Harmsworth. Though she had no traffic with such concepts as regret, fear or failure, she was clearly bitterly disappointed. Out of this disappointment she constructed a curious story.
As she told it, Wadley came close to death days after the race, in a fire at the house they were renting. The house was empty at the time, but a boy spotted the doll on a windowsill in the burning building, and plucked him from the blaze. When Wadley was restored to Joe she rewarded his young saviour with as much ice-cream as he could eat. She had always had a special fondness for boys, and the rescue of Wadley confirmed to her that she and they shared an understanding.
Soon afterwards, Joe said, as the party left their holiday home for the railway station, their motor car spun into a ditch; again Carstairs and Wadley were unscathed.
Joe later claimed that before she left England for America a fortune-teller had predicted that her rivals would attempt to kill her by forcing her boat to crash, that her house would burn down, and that her car would career into a ditch. All these predictions, she said, came true. Newspaper reports confirm that her holiday home near the river caught fire in 1930; the building was destroyed, and Joe helped the fire brigades save other cottages. The motor car accident was not recorded in the press. But the boat crash had taken place two years earlier, during Joe’s first attempt at the Harmsworth.
By including the fortune-teller’s premonition in her account and by telescoping the sinking of the boat, the fire and the car crash – the triple deliverance from death – Carstairs created meaning out of accident. She gave magic and depth to the story by shadowing her experiences with Wadley’s. Told in these terms, her trip to America took on epic proportions: it was shot through not with defeat but with miracles.
Back in England Joe was forced to deal with impertinent questions from the press, which she handled with good grace. ‘An attractive young sportswoman smilingly admitted to me this afternoon that she places her career before marriage,’ ran one article. ‘She is Miss Betty Carstairs, the daring motor-boat racer, whom I had just told of rumours of her engagement. “There is not a word of truth in them,” she replied. “I am far too interested in racing to worry about a husband.” ’
In 1930 Joe gave her friend Malcolm Campbell £10,000 towards building a racing car, Bluebird, in which he attained 245mph the next year, breaking his own world land-speed record. On his return to London, Campbell made a triumphal progress to receive his knighthood: he and the mighty Bluebird were national icons. Joe had wanted her contribution to Bluebird kept secret but somehow it came out, and Campbell publicly thanked her for her generosity. She had been reduced to vicarious success, to the role of wealthy patron rather than action hero – Malcolm Campbell, who had once described Joe Carstairs as ‘the greatest sportsman I know’, was now thanking her for her money. She had been shifted off the male stage, and into a traditional female position behind the scenes. Betraying her envy of Campbell, Joe later remarked ‘usually he drives like an old woman’.
Even the X Garage was no more: it had folded in 1928, driven out of business when Daimler set up its own touring company. In any case, both Bardie Coleclough and Joan Mackern became engaged to be married that year. In 1929 Bardie married Billy Tyrrell, an Irish international rugby player who had been awarded six DSOs in the war, and Joan married a solicitor.
Joe did carry on racing in Britain for a few months, and she continued to meet with disappointment. In an attempt to recapture the glory days, when Newg and Sonia triumphed in English waters, Joe built a Newg II and a Sonia II. At the Detroit News Trophy race in 1931 Newg II shot out of the water, heeled over and sank, throwing the Joes Harris and Carstairs clear. The same year Joe challenged the French yachtswoman Madame V. Heriot to a 190-mile race from Ryde to the Havre lightship and back: Mme Heriot’s Ailée beat Sonia II by seventeen minutes. Bardie Coleclough recalled this as the only time she saw Joe angry – on the drive home, Joe told Bardie that she was going to emigrate. (Tallulah Bankhead had also had enough of England by 1931, and she returned that year to the United States, leaving her dresser, Kate, to be Joe and Ruth’s housekeeper at Mulberry Walk.)
From then on, Joe Carstairs spent little time in Britain – or the public eye. In 1931 Joe, Wadley and Mabs Jenkins, a manicurist with a small green scorpion tattooed on her thigh, set off on a round-the-world voyage. (Mabs had been the other woman to fall overboard on the night that Anthony Heckstall-Smith rescued Ruth Baldwin.) Their visit to India was the highlight of the trip.
‘The place calls,’ Joe said; it was the place where she believed her father had died. ‘Ever since I was a kid I have been used to handling a gun, and I love shooting.’ Joe and ‘Kip’, as she nicknamed Mabs, shot a panther apiece. After Kip’s kill the two women were so hot that they went for a swim in a lake thick with crocodiles. ‘I do not remember enjoying a swim so much,’ Carstairs said. ‘It was here I shot the crocodile we shipped home.’ Joe shot her panther at twenty-five yards. ‘I had the satisfaction of seeing my animal drop right in its tracks,’ she boasted. ‘It makes you feel bucked at the moment of doing that, you know. It was a male panther, and was one inch under eight feet long.’
Over fifteen months Joe and Mabs visited Cuba, Honolulu, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, Bali, Java and Singapore. ‘Nothing stopped,’ said Joe. ‘It went on and on.’ A Sri Lankan served as a batman to the two women, and Joe supported him and his family for the rest of his life. When he fell in love, he asked ‘the Respected Miss’ for permission to marry, and every year he sent her boxes of tea.
After her trip round the world, as if unmoored, Joe travelled back and forth between London, where she still lived with Ruth, and New York, where she lived with Isabel T. Pell, a doctor’s daughter and ‘a very charming girl I was having a thing with’.
‘Ruth didn’t like it,’ said Joe. ‘Ruth used to start throwing her guns around and carrying on. On and on and on and on. She was so drunk most of the time. I don’t think it was my fault.’ Joe’s relationship with Ruth had run into trouble. Both women seemed to have lost their bearings, but Ruth, with no Wadley to anchor her, more dangerously so. Ruth, like Joe’s mother, was drinking heavily and using drugs – heroin and probably cocaine, which was readily available in London nightclubs.
Having built five vessels to win glory for her country, Joe Carstairs started to use her boats to flee it. ‘I will set sail and be a regular sailor,’ she told the New York Times. ‘As a matter of fact, that is what I enjoy being more than anything else. I have no bent for art or for such accomplishments as one usually associates with girls. I love the water, the being a sailor, with the free, soothing sea beneath me.’
She described Sonia II as her ‘floating home’. A three-masted, 450-ton schooner, Sonia II had three bathrooms and an oak-panelled saloon mo
re than sixty feet square. In 1931 Joe took her schooner on a treasure hunt to Cocos Island, 500 miles south-west of Panama, where booty worth $12,000,000 was said to be buried. The Spanish pirate Don Pedro Benito had reputedly hidden his illgotten gains on the island in 1822 and then – like Captain Flint in Stevenson’s Treasure Island – slain all those who knew its whereabouts. Joe failed to find the treasure, as Malcolm Campbell had before her.
The next year Joe built the Berania, a miniature version of her beloved Berengaria. Like an ocean liner, the Berania housed a cocktail bar, a kitchen, a pantry, a dining saloon, a deck saloon (which served as a dance-floor), three cabins, crew space with cots and a promenade deck. Beneath two of the bunks were huge tanks, each holding 2,500 gallons of fuel. Designed by Fred Cooper and built in the Sylvia Yard, the Berania was constructed to withstand heavy weather and to run at speed – she was the fastest and most powerful express motor cruiser in British waters. Berania and Sonia II were Joe’s prototype isles of exile.
In 1933 Joe saw an advertisement in an American newspaper offering for sale an island in the British West Indies. She sailed over to see it. In 1934 she bought Whale Cay for $40,000, and left England for good. She told the press that she was going because of the prohibitive tax rates in Britain. She was receiving about £1,000 a week from her trust funds but she later admitted to friends that she was $100,000 in debt, having paid no taxes at all in Britain or America in the 1920s. She said that her flight to the British West Indies, a tax haven, was her only way of escaping jail. But there were other inducements to go, among them the collapse of her dream to be the fastest motorboat racer in the world, the deterioration of her relationship with Ruth and the growing hostility of the British press and public.
‘I am going to live surrounded only by coloured people,’ she said. ‘I am not even taking a motor car, for when I bought the island there were no roads. Now I am building roads and a residence, but my only means of transport will be two ten-foot dinghies. The island is about 1,000 acres in extent and is nine miles long. I cannot say if I will ever return.’
Again Joe pre-empted her own abandonment, rejecting those who seemed on the brink of rejecting her. ‘I want to be left alone,’ she told the press. ‘There was a time when I couldn’t live my own life, could not get away from publicity. Well, that’s over.’
Chapter Eleven
Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady
When Joe Carstairs first set eyes on Whale Cay, the force of her feelings animated the island, imbued it with her own desire. Joe claimed it beckoned to her. ‘Come on,’ urged Whale Cay, ‘I want you.’
‘This island,’ Joe maintained, ‘had a particular liking for me.’
The British West Indies, as the Bahamas were then known, lay off the coast of Florida. In the late nineteenth century Gordon Lewis, a British writer, described the archipelago as ‘a forgotten, derelict corner of the world’. Not much had changed.
The people of the Bahamas had always lived off the sea, not only as fishermen but as pirates in the eighteenth century and as wreckers since the seventeenth: ships frequently foundered on the shallow rocks and reefs, and the islanders were adept at plundering their shells. From the 1840s Bahamians also farmed the reefs for sponges for export, and in the 1920s, during the American Prohibition, many worked as rum-runners. The people’s lives were so governed by the wind and the sea that they spoke of the islands, like ships, as having windward and leeward sides: to windward, tenacious vines and shrubs clung to the stony edge; to leeward, mangrove thickets rose from the water, a dark green tangle.
In 1930 the 700 islands were populated by 60,000 people, 50,000 of them black. The ruling class of whites lived in Nassau, New Providence, the capital of the colony; the other islands and cays, known as the Out Islands, were inhabitated almost entirely by blacks.
By the mid-1930s a serious depression had descended on the British West Indies. Since the United States had repealed its prohibition law in 1933 the rich trade in smuggling alcohol to the southern states had collapsed. Fewer ships were passing through the archipelago, so there were also fewer wrecks. The sponge trade was declining through overfishing. The United States, meanwhile, countered its own unemployment problem by tightening immigration restrictions, so closing another means by which Bahamians could escape poverty. And between 1926 and 1932 a series of strong storms and hurricanes had hit the islands, devastating crops and settlements. On the Out Islands there were cases of death by starvation.
Whale Cay was one of the thirty Berry Islands, thirty miles north-west of Nassau and ninety miles east of Miami. When Joe arrived the cay was inhabited by a black couple who tended the lighthouse. Joe asked them whether they lit the beacon every night, and they replied, to her amusement, ‘Only when the weather’s good.’
Joe was not the first white person to try to tame Whale Cay. She said that the original settler was a young favourite of Queen Victoria’s, who was sent there when he ran into political trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century. Joe liked to compare her situation to his. ‘I was an exile,’ she said. In 1906 the island was bought by a Mr Wilde, who tried to farm sisal, a fibrous plant used for ships’ rope, and built himself a house from mud and wine bottles. But his business did not flourish and he abandoned the cay. Then a hotel group tried and failed to develop Whale Cay as a holiday resort; one of its members was said to have killed himself in the house built by Mr Wilde. In the 1920s, when alcohol was banned in the United States, Americans took day-trips from Florida to the island to attend rum-drinking parties hosted by Harold Christie, the leading real-estate developer in the British West Indies. Once Prohibition ended the island lost its value as a drinking resort, and it was Christie who sold Whale Cay to Joe.
‘When I saw the island I thought this is what I must do,’ Joe said. ‘Something great will come of it.’ In the year that she took up residence there H. M. Bell wrote in Isles of June, his book about the British West Indies, that the colony was ‘above all a man’s land – giving him back stoutness of spirit, bringing out the pioneer worth that lies hidden in us all’. Joe had to battle to master her island, but this made the prize the more precious: ‘I don’t think anything is worthwhile unless you fight for it,’ she said. ‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’
The islands of the British West Indies were the flattened peaks of a giant submarine mountain rising out of the Atlantic Ocean. Joe Carstairs was god of her own portion of this watery Olympus. And to live on Whale Cay was virtually to live in the sea. Its land, which had once been sea-bed, was oolitic limestone, formed by the compacted skeletons of billions of marine creatures. Nine miles long and four miles wide, the cay rose gently from the waters around it; off the shore at the northern end the ocean floor dropped suddenly to 6,500ft. Low hills, made of sand blown up by the ocean winds, sat at the northern tip of the cay and white beaches circled the coast. The sea around them teemed. Coral reefs, visible through the light water, lay off the beaches, and shoals of fish swarmed through this living rock – grunts, porgies, red snappers, groupers, parrot fish, angel fish. Further out swam blue-fin tuna, dolphins, barracudas and sharks.
The island’s surface was thick with grasses and low jungle. The sisal planted by Mr Wilde had grown straggly and tall. Joe hired seven men from Nassau to help her clear a path and lay road from one end of the island to the other.
‘The natives didn’t like work,’ Joe said. ‘They didn’t know anything about this kind of work. They had to be shown in detail each step they took. On top of that it was unbearably hot. We wallowed in dust to our knees. Sand flies and other insects bit us almost to the point of distraction. I almost surrendered the island there and then. But I’m stubborn.’
Carstairs, dressed always in khaki, worked alongside the roadlayers – they squatted down to break up the rock with tiny mallets while she climbed trees for a view of where the road should run. The way through the bush was cleared by an old man on a small tractor who chewed his way through three cigars a day. The only other v
ehicle on Whale Cay in the early days was a red Ford pick-up truck. Later Joe rode a red motorcycle round the island, from which she would holler to her workers: ‘Climb on, fellows!’
One morning, Joe said, she and the roadlayers were taking their lunch by the track – she ate oranges, they rice and peas – when she slipped a knife from her belt and hurled it at a snake. ‘And by God I cut that goddamn snake’s head right off.’ The men were deeply impressed, and from then on all the islanders called Joe ‘The Boss’. ‘I was a leader,’ said Joe. ‘I could do anything.’
Joe Carstairs’ arrival was a godsend to many. As the buildings of Whale Cay went up and the roads went down people poured in from neighbouring islands. In all, twenty-six miles of carefully signposted road were laid. The first building to be raised was the store. There the workers used their wages – $4 a week for men, $3 for women – to buy lard, rice, sugar, tea and coffee with which to supplement their diet of fish. For refrigeration a large hole was dug on the island and filled with blocks of ice brought over from the mainland by boat.
To begin with, Joe and her friends lived in Mr Wilde’s leaky, termite-ridden house at the northern end of the island. ‘When it rained,’ she recalled, ‘it rained in every room.’ Joe walked the length of the cay each day to supervise the construction of the Great House at the southern tip. She had hired an architect to design the house but soon dispensed with him – ‘He had too many ideas.’ The foreman was an American, Mickey Moore: ‘A bit of a drunkard,’ Joe said, ‘but a marvellous man . . . Small, tough, with a shaved head, very anti-black.’
‘Mr Moore made reference to my wife under her skirt,’ one of the men complained to Carstairs. For this Joe chastised Mickey Moore. ‘I could curse them,’ she later explained. ‘They took it from me. But not from Mr Moore.’ Joe and Mickey Moore lunched together on dried herring and coffee made with brackish water from the island wells. In the evenings Mickey Moore retired to his shack, which he shared with a big white cat. Joe too brought a large cat to Whale Cay to deal with the mice and rats in the store. The cats mated, and soon scores of their progeny roamed over the island.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 9