Eventually three hundred men were working on the Great House, poling sacks of cement up the river by barge and making concrete blocks reinforced with steel. The house was completed in 1936. It resembled a sturdy Spanish villa, white, with red tiles and wrought-iron railings, and the lawns were planted with palm, tamarind, almond and sea grape trees; the walls surrounding the estate were lined with bushes of oleander, hibiscus and mastik. There were five bedrooms, five large bathrooms, a cold room for meats, a laundry, a dining room, a living room, a kitchen. All were hung with copper ships’ lanterns. There were fans to cool the hot winds, and a huge fireplace to warm the main room when it grew cold. Beneath the house was a cistern holding 75,000 gallons of water, so it sat like a liner on its own private sea. The natives lived in shacks in Buckle Cut, a stretch of land adjoining the walled enclosure of the Great House, or on the boats in which they had sailed to the island.
Joe cleared the coconut groves, which had been choked with weeds, and planted 3,000 new palms. The land was fertilised with humus and irrigated with rainwater stored in huge cisterns. The men sowed fruit and vegetables in pockets of soil among the rocks and they cultivated fields. The women were assigned to pull up weeds on the roads – they became known to Joe and her entourage as weeders or weedresses. Joe did not approve of women labourers: ‘If there weren’t so many lazy men, women wouldn’t have to go to work.’ But not all the men were indolent, Joe soon found. She chose her favourites, among them Harry Johnson, who was put in charge of the store, and Jim Moncur, the cook in the Great House.
Joe rebuilt the lighthouse on Whale Cay, fitting it with an electric beacon, and put up a power plant, a radio station, a schoolhouse (on the peak of a hill near the dock) and a circular museum. The island granary, chock-full of corn and guinea corn as well as coconuts, was among the biggest in the Bahamas. Joe experimented with canning fish, with kippering the goggle (herring) and with making fertiliser from fish by-products. She reared pigs and chickens, which at first laid fishy eggs because they ate so many land-crabs.
Joe bought more islands – Bird Cay, Cat Cay, Devil’s Cay, half of Hoffman’s Cay, a tract of land on the huge island of Andros sixty miles away – and established plantations of canteloupes, potatoes, celery, strawberries, asparagus, bananas, carrots, rice and unusually large peanuts. The Andros farm was the most successful: the small plots of deep soil were protected against rain and flood by terraces of loose stone and against the scorching sun by blankets of pine needles.
Joe acquired a former rum-running cruiser, Vergemere III, with which to dredge the beaches and make a harbour at the north end of the island. Once the harbour was built, Vergemere III, Sonia II and Berania were joined by new boats: Whale and Little Doctor were fishing boats, Elsa a speedboat and Sophie a launch. In a barn by Shipyard Point Joe had her men build an eighty-five-foot schooner, Vergemere IV, which she helped design. The boats’ captains included a Captain Cooke, who Joe brought over from England and whose family she supported for fifty years after he left her service. Estelle IV was put up on stays by the dock, as a relic, and the engines of Estelle II lay by her.
For several years only boats in distress could draw Joe Carstairs out of her seclusion. In December 1937 she summoned the Miami coast guard when a yacht full of American schoolboys ran aground on Whale Cay. The New York Times ran a news story on the incident: ‘Lt F. A. Erickson, a Coast Guard flier from the Miami station who landed at Whale Cay, her island kingdom, for directions, reported that a girl garbed in men’s clothing, who gave the name of B. Carstairs, and a man named Albury had guided him to the vessel.’
Sam Albury was Joe’s manager. Bob Coleclough, the brother of Bardie and Molly, had come out as manager in 1934 but he could stomach neither the isolation nor the circling sharks. After a few months he and Joe had a row and he left. Joe seems to have forgiven him, though – she gave Bostwick, her estate in Hampshire, to Bob and his wife, and in 1939 offered to shelter their children on the island as war evacuees.
Ruth Baldwin refused to live on Whale Cay – life there was too primitive and isolated for her tastes. But she visited from a holiday home Joe bought her near Miami; in Ruth’s house was a bar named the Wadley Arms, with Wadley’s likeness beaming out from a wooden sign hanging over the door. In the early days Joe’s girlfriend on the island was Addison, a white woman who one islander remembered as being ‘like Miss Carstairs, like a man’; she also made exquisite jewellery. But Addison ‘doped awfully’, Joe said, and became increasingly difficult to live with. Sometimes Joe found herself in the unlikely position of taking refuge in Ruth’s house in Florida.
By the late 1930s more than 200 black men and women were living permanently on Whale Cay, overseen by a small white coterie. Besides Albury, the two men who helped Joe run the island were John Howcroft and Hugh Brooke, known as Tim. Joe had come across John when he was playing the saxophone on the Berengaria. ‘John was so pretty,’ she said, ‘that I took him for my own.’ John adored Joe, and proved profoundly loyal – it was he who was dispatched to turf Ruth Baldwin out of sailors’ bars in Miami. But whatever Joe liked to believe, John was not her own: unlike Wadley, he was not a talisman. Joe found it difficult to share John, and at about the time of his first marriage they fell out; they were eventually reconciled.
Tim Brooke, a writer, joined Joe on the island in 1934. In 1930 he had published the well-received novel Man Made Angry, and in his first year on Whale Cay he wrote Saturday Island, about the relationship between a boy and a woman shipwrecked together. The book seems to be set on Whale Cay; a map on the inside cover shows a long, narrow island marked with such place-names as Trafalgar Square, Southampton Harbour, Balmoral and Kensington Gardens – Tunbridge Wells is a small outcrop off the coast. Tim was a drinker and a prankster, always ready to join in Joe’s games. In sketches the two of them devised for guests on the island, Joe, like a man in drag, would play such emasculating heroines as Salome and Cleopatra.
Once the Great House was built, Joe received a steady stream of friends from England and America, sometimes twenty at a time. Old friends such as Malcolm Campbell, Mabs Jenkins and Bardie Coleclough came. Tallulah Bankhead came, as did Louisa Carpenter du Pont Jenney, a markedly butch lesbian and heiress to a large portion of the du Pont fortune, Marti Mann, later a leading light in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Mercedes de Acosta, a witch-like woman who had affairs with both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Joe found Mercedes extremely irritating, particularly when she mooned over one of Joe’s girlfriends; the girlfriend remembered Joe shoving Mercedes into an amphibious plane at the end of her stay.
On the cay Joe slept with a series of women she met on her annual trips to New York or Europe or on excursions to Miami. ‘I’ve never had to go out and race and win,’ she said. ‘They just fall in my lap.’ Few were kept on for long: after a while Joe would find herself thinking, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to go to bed with her again.’ Some she had trouble getting rid of. In one case, Joe palmed off a girlfriend on a Hollywood film star who needed to marry as a cover for his homosexuality. But she kept photographs of all her conquests. Was she a great lover? a friend asked her. ‘I was made to think so. Everybody else thought so, so I thought so too. I would have liked me.’ So she was sensational in bed? ‘Oh yes.’
Though Joe herself drank little and took no drugs, her parties were riotous. She also laid on films, rented and home-made, poker games, boxing matches and expeditions to hunt birds and wild goat on neighbouring islands. Joe would take her guests to see the Blue Hole, a thirty-five-foot crater at Hoffman’s Cay, or to swim off Devil’s Cay. They had the run of Whale Cay: there were cars to choose from, and a beach for every wind. (The black workers had their own beach: ‘We couldn’t have them all over the place,’ Joe explained.) Joe staged fishing competitions with cash prizes. She would return from a couple of hours at sea with enough fish to feed the island; the barracudas and sharks were hung under the fruit trees.
In 1936 Joe Carstairs’ racing trophies – valued at £900
– were stolen from Mulberry Walk, where Ruth was still living for most of the year. Soon afterwards Joe visited London. She seemed angry, noted the Daily Sketch. ‘When I left England everyone imagined the most extraordinary things,’ Joe told the newspaper. ‘Why, I can’t think. People seemed to think that there must be some reason for my leaving the country. As if I can’t live where I like! I don’t like living in England. I am a British subject with an American mother but I do not count myself as British. I prefer now to call myself a colonial – a West Indian.’ Her fury seems to have stemmed from the suggestion that she had been driven out of England; she conveniently forgot that in 1934 she had claimed that the rate of taxation, if nothing else, had forced her to leave. (She did not finish paying off the taxes she owed until 1945.)
As if to make clear that it was she who was shutting the world out, and not the world which had excluded her, Joe surrounded all the buildings on Whale Cay with walls. ‘I just liked it,’ she said. ‘Everything had a wall around it.’ Yet the walls were statements of authority as much as withdrawal. In building her miniature kingdom she not only banished the outside world but demanded its respect.
Chapter Twelve
They Thought I was Most Unusual
The West African men and women shipped to the West Indies as slaves since the seventeenth century had brought with them their faith in obeah, a form of voodoo. At the heart of obeah was a belief in the power of the obeah-woman or man, known also as the bush-doctor, and the fetishes he or she wielded. These could work good or evil, swelling a man till he burst or curing him of illness. Carstairs banned obeah on Whale Cay – she, after all, was the dominating spirit of the island – but she could not have failed to understand its power: in many ways the structures of obeah were similar to those which sustained her.
Though obeah was illegal, it was still widely practised in the British West Indies. In 1938 the Nassau Tribune, one of the two leading Bahamian newspapers, reported the case of Dorothy Gordon of the island of Eleuthera, a fifteen-year-old girl from whose nostrils small glass crystals were reputedly issuing.
Dr Fields was called . . . and medical science had an explanation for the unusual disorder, but when the neck of a beer bottle came out of the woman’s chest and the bottom and side of a gin bottle literally oozed out of her breast, it presented a major phenomenon that no science could explain.
The woman came to Nassau last week, soon after this attack, and the Commissioner has brought a collection of the glass to the city on this trip. This strange incident was also witnessed by a Mr W. B. Johnson, Government Tomato Inspector, who has just returned from Eleuthera . . .
‘She tells me that she passed a piece of lamp chimney from the centre of her head at Tarpum Bay two years ago,’ said the Commissioner. ‘Her mother says that she has passed as high as 50 pieces of glass in one spell. I don’t know about this . . . The woman claims that she got a dose of obeah that was set for her mother.’
The inhabitants of Whale Cay practised obeah. A young black boy who was close to Joe grew so jealous of one of the maids in the Great House that he was said to have ‘hexed’ her, forcing her to flee the island.
Joe Carstairs, with her cherished doll, was the closest thing to an obeah-woman on Whale Cay. Wadley was always at her side – in her boats, in the truck, on the motorbike – and the people suspected he had magical properties. They said the doll was her witchcraft man, able to discover and disclose their secrets. Joe was so strong and fearless that it seemed she was charmed, that a mystery protected her. ‘I couldn’t figure it out,’ reflected one Bahamian who lived on Whale Cay. ‘That was her idol, right?’ If Joe encouraged such beliefs, she did not need to dissemble to do so: she believed herself supernaturally blessed and she suspected that Wadley was charged with magic. As a friend observed, ‘Wadley was her religion.’
Among Joe’s favourite books was The White Witch of Rosehall, a novel by Herbert G. de Lisser first published in 1929. Based on a true story, it is set in a Jamaican slave plantation almost exactly a century before Joe bought Whale Cay. The ‘White Witch’ of the title is Annie Palmer, a ‘sort of woman hermit’ who owns the Rosehall estate. ‘She always felt that in England she would count for but little; there would be no supremacy for her there. In Jamaica there was. Here she could live alone, almost unfettered, the life she loved, a life of domination and sensuality. Here she could put to proof the powers she possessed and of which she was inordinately proud.’ Annie Palmer bans obeah among her people, only to practise it herself in order to work her will. She is ‘white, lovely, imperious, strong, fearless . . . just the sort of girl that a superstitious people would have worshipped . . . and regarded as a sort of goddess . . . Annie came to believe that she possessed the power of a god.’ Annie strides about her land brandishing a heavy riding whip (Joe too was said to carry a riding crop) and takes pleasure in watching slaves being flogged. When she conducts her magic rites she dresses ‘all in black and like a man’. Annie Palmer also shared with Joe Carstairs a horror of boredom. ‘Hell must be a place of utter boredom,’ Annie says, ‘which is the worst torment a soul can endure.’
‘Dull,’ Joe said, ‘is a word that should be torn to pieces to see what it is made of.’ To ensure life was never dull, Joe created her own myths, using theatre and practical jokes to at once parody her image and to increase its power. ‘It amused her very much to play with people,’ said one of her girlfriends. Joe was always stirring up fun and trouble. Often she tricked her house guests, making them believe themselves an audience when they were truly players in her theatre. One night Joe briefed a group of islanders to shine up their faces, strip down to their shorts and drum menacingly outside the Great House. She then told her friends inside that the natives were rioting. ‘The blacks are going to kill us all,’ she warned. ‘Pansies first, women last.’ Having whipped up a suitable panic, and sent her guests scuttling upstairs, she strode out and shot off some guns. Then she returned to the house. ‘I think it’s going to be all right now,’ she said.
The Bishop of Nassau visited Whale Cay to dedicate the church in 1938. Joe had a series of pistol shots fired outside his window at one in the morning, and was impressed that he never made mention of the incident.
In the guest bedrooms in the Great House she pinned up a sign:
notice to guests
(1) use light switch only when standing on rubber mat provided.
(2) all visitors wishing morning tea in their rooms will be dealt with accordingly.
(3) it is desirable for guests to sleep under the beds as the management cannot be held responsible for any detrimental inconsistencies therein.
(4) please refrain from using buzzer provided. servants resting from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m.
(5) any olive pits, razor blades, safety deposit boxes, or winchells columns left in beds only confuse the staff. kleenex is provided for these purposes.
(6) ignore calendar. the management does not coincide with anniversaries.
(7) do not disturb moths in clothes closet. hatching season.
(8) do not put clothes in bureau drawers. never mind why.
(9) avoid looking at pictures. immoral!
The notice – anarchic, absurd – was designed to amuse as much as disconcert. But Joe could be righteous and her games could be correspondingly sadistic. When a rich friend of hers took a job in a prestigious New York department store, Joe was outraged by what she saw as injustice – she felt that the post should have gone to someone who needed the money. Joe visited the shop in the guise of a Russian countess (she could adopt immaculate foreign accents), accompanied by Tim Brooke and an Italian man dressed in black suits and hats. While being served by her friend, who did not recognise her through the layers of make-up, Joe suddenly announced that her emerald ring had vanished. The store was turned upside down, and when Joe eventually ‘found’ her ring she continued to insist that the assistant had tried to steal it. Her friend was sacked.
Joe loved to dress up as a woman. For fancy-dre
ss parties she would wear frumpy dresses and ludicrously vivid make-up, and for shopping excursions in New York donned a blonde wig, a chiffon dress, a fur stole and high heels. ‘To her, that was the epitome of a costume,’ said a friend. At the Elizabeth Arden beauty salon in Miami one day, Joe snatched the lingerie from a mannequin and pulled it on over her khaki shirt and trousers, then pulled the dummy’s wig on to her own head. Decked out in these, she went into the street and paraded herself, poker-faced.
She also enjoyed putting on the costume of a doctor. In the 1940s Joe had a strikingly beautiful girlfriend she nicknamed ‘Cow’ or ‘Cowley’, supposedly for her even temper; Joe in turn was ‘Dockle’, for her love of doctoring. At a fancy-dress party on Whale Cay, Carstairs enacted a tableau of their relationship: dressed as a doctor, in a stovepipe hat and Abraham Lincoln beard, she led into the room a real cow (when this cow died it was buried on the island, with a tombstone reading ‘Cowley Really’). At another party the human ‘Cowley’ herself popped out of a chest entirely naked, playing The Flight of the Bumblebee on a flute. Imitation cows – of cloth, of fur, of china – filled the shelves of their home, some of them accompanied by miniature doctors. One toy cow in particular was worn thin with Joe’s kisses.
It is curious that Joe liked to play the doctor, taking on the profession of the hated Serge Voronoff, her mother’s fourth husband. But then, one way or another, she modelled herself on all her mother’s husbands: Roger de Perigny was a promiscuous playboy who drove fast cars; and in setting up a private regiment on Whale Cay with herself as ruler, Joe emulated Albert Carstairs and Francis Francis, both colonial army officers.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 10