The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water

by Kate Summerscale

  Joe’s half-brother Frank had been selected to represent Britain in three Olympic events in 1928, though he had to withdraw after contracting scarlet fever. He had then become a daring aviator and a champion amateur golfer. (Joe dismissed golf, in which both her half-brother and half-sister made their names, as an old person’s game.) During the Second World War, Frank helped produce fighter aircraft for the RAF and ferried planes between airfields; he later played a part in inventing the ejection seat. Frank Francis shared Joe’s enthusiasm for actresses. In 1929 he had been dismissed from the Royal Horse Guards for marrying an actress, an American named Sunny Jarman; they were later divorced and in 1947 he married another actress, Patricia Leonard.

  A year after selling Bird Cay to Frank, Joe was enraged to hear that he was charging his workers to buy vegetables which they had grown, and she turned piratical Robin Hood. One night she mounted a raid on Bird Cay, sending out a posse of men armed with sharpened cutlasses to raze Frank’s crops. In effect she was destroying the livelihood of the people she purported to be defending from injustice, but this was clearly secondary to her war with her brother. When the police tried to interview her about the raid she refused to allow them to set foot on her land. In another reprisal attack, in the early 1950s, Joe Carstairs scuttled all her brother’s boats, stranding him on his cay. On yet another occasion she and her friends sabotaged Frank’s wheat machine by mixing sand with the guinea corn.

  These pirate games were partly in the spirit of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, in which Nancy Blackett hoists the Jolly Roger above her dinghy, the Amazon, to embark on spirited adventures on the waters. But Joe’s pranks had a nasty edge. The culture of cruelty in the family was such that Joe would secretly attend amateur golf tournaments in which her half-sister, Sally, was competing and hide in the bushes until the final shot; then she would jump out and shout ‘Boo!’ to put Sally off her stroke. When Frank visited Whale Cay she played the bossy big sister, sending him and his wife up to their room while one of the party performed a striptease. Frank, in turn, called her Josef (for her resemblance to Stalin), Comtesse (for her marriage to de Pret) or Betty (the name which most irritated her). Once Joe was caught in a storm while sailing in Little Doctor, a fishing boat, and she crashed on the shores of Bird Cay. She was forced to seek help from Frank. She refused to admit to any loss of face, merely remarking: ‘I managed the boat magnificently.’

  Frank distinguished himself as an aircraft pilot before the war, and this may have needled Joe into taking up flying herself: in 1944 she made her first solo flight and the next year won her private pilot’s licence. (It was when she looked up her birth certificate, to apply for the licence, that she discovered her mother’s real name.) Joe then acquired a Widgeon, a twin-engined plane which cost her $20,000. The plane, importantly, could touch down on water as well as land. ‘I understand water better than land,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t have much attraction to land.’ Joe flew her plane around the Bahamian archipelago and up to New York.

  On one of these journeys, in an episode reminiscent of the descent into the earth at Arras in 1919 and of the plunge into the waters at Detroit in 1928, Joe fell through the sky above Cape Hatteras, and thought she had reached the other world.

  She and her co-pilot, a man named Furey, were caught in a terrible storm over North Carolina. The wind was blowing at 80mph and the plane was forced to fly at a dangerous height of 12,000 feet. They were short of oxygen, Furey had a heart condition, and both thought their chances of survival were slim. Suddenly a hole opened in the clouds beneath them. They saw below, lit up by the sun, a disused landing strip and airport. They descended through the clouds, landed and disembarked; canvases flapped around them, and they noticed that the abandoned hangars were filled with birds. As they walked away from the craft they came across a dog who backed off in fear, its hair standing on end. ‘Furey, I think we’re dead,’ Joe said, and the two pinched each other for reassurance. When telling this story, Joe remarked that she and Furey were the same size, could wear each other’s clothes almost, and that they must have looked nearly identical in their leather flying jackets. It was a curious aside; it must have passed through Joe’s mind that in death she would be twinned with a little man.

  The two of them, unsure whether they had been plucked from life or from death, walked on through the deserted landscape until they reached a small store. The people inside looked horrified. ‘Now I know we’re dead,’ Joe told Furey. ‘They’ve seen ghosts.’ The storekeeper sold them Coca-Cola and biscuits and told them that they had landed on a former navy airfield. Joe described the incident as ‘something to do with a miracle’.

  Joe soon hatched ambitious plans for her new hobby. In 1945 she filed for American citizenship and presented the Miami city council with her plan to build a private airport on Lummus Island, to serve the smaller craft which were clogging up the central terminal. The proposed Carstairs Airport was opposed on grounds of the noise and damage to property values it might cause. Joe fought a long battle over planning permission. ‘They thought I was an adventurer, an impostor, a bloody foreigner,’ she said. A friend asked her if she thought she was the victim of prejudice, as a woman who dressed in men’s clothes. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Joe replied. ‘I never thought of it. I’ve never been conscious of prejudice. Never once.’ Joe mounted a vigorous publicity campaign for her airport based on the words ‘Progress, Safety, Convenience, Control, Good Citizenship’. In 1948, bitterly, she had to concede defeat. ‘It came to the fact that there was not enough money to bribe these fucking people. I refused to do it.’

  Ten years later she again crossed swords with the authorities in Miami. Sealark, the yacht of a New Orleans businessman, was grounded on a beach at Whale Cay. Joe introduced herself to the owner as the British Commissioner on the island and demanded the surrender of the yacht’s papers. He refused to comply so she ran up her own flag, summoned her people and instructed them to loot the yacht; one family took home a television. Joe was subsequently fined $5,000 in the Miami federal court.

  If she had been born a boy, Joe said, she would have grown up to be an admiral. Since this was denied her, she turned to piracy. She said that if she had reached the Bahamas a few years earlier, during the American prohibition of alcohol, she would certainly have run rum. ‘Oh, rather,’ she exclaimed. ‘Boy, would I have liked it. I don’t give a fuck about the law.’ She was tickled by the fact that customs officers often suspected Wadley of being stuffed with contraband. (The Jack Stripes, the boat Joe had built to cross the Atlantic in 1928, fulfilled her fantasy for her: in the 1950s, as Voodoo, she was said to be the fastest blockade runner in the Mediterranean, ferrying whisky from Tangier to Marseille.)

  Joe took her freedom from the sea – she respected its laws more than those of any country, sensed its temperament more keenly than that of any person. ‘I don’t think anybody knows more about the sea,’ she said. ‘I understand the sea. Sometimes it’s angry, sometimes I’m angry.’

  Sea voyages rescued her from her mother when she was eleven and from her country when she was thirty-four. She used to tell people she was born with a caul – with her amniotic sac, the shroud of a miniature sea, wrapped about her head. According to folklore, babies born with a caul were gifted with second sight and immunity from death by drowning; Joe’s miraculous escapes in races and storms, then, were evidence of a sea-blessing. To Joe the ocean was a place of flux and metamorphosis. The sea repeatedly baptised her, and she saw herself as a creature of the water rather as Peter Pan was a creature of the air.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It Felt Like A Woman had Died

  In Whale Cay Joe had found a home which surpassed even an ocean liner – a private world buttressed by the water from intruders, surrounded by a seemingly endless moat. To emphasise the volume of water that enveloped her, she would tell visitors to Whale Cay – correctly – that the island lay not in the Caribbean Sea but at the tongue of the Atlantic Ocean.

  W
hen hurricanes hit Whale Cay the ocean was whipped from its bed and hurled across the land. Joe was literally in her element. Among her poems of 1941 was an ode to the hurricane: ‘Threshing/ Beating/ Stamping/ Fleeting/ High/ Flying/ Wind/ Of disaster/ Faster/ And faster/ Tear/ Up the world!’ In the summer of 1949 a hurricane blew for twelve hours, the eye of the storm directly over the island, and reached 150mph. The boards nailed to the windows of the Great House rattled and slammed. Fish flew across the sky and fell to lie dying in the roads. The greenhouse and three houses were quite destroyed. Joe remarked on ‘the extraordinary, strange smell that comes, of dampness and dead fish, but to me it was an excitement . . . to me it was delightful.’ After the storm the shores of the island lay littered with the carcasses of fish. On one beach the dead fish were swept in and out on the tides for days, and seagulls came down to eat their eyes.

  It was a violent hurricane in the late 1940s that drove away Joe’s girlfriend Charlotte. Charlotte was classically beautiful, fair, spirited, elegant, charming and, in her own words, ‘petted’. They had met in 1941 when Joe – wrapped in a mink coat, her fingernails bright red, her hair coiffed – walked into the bookshop in New York where Charlotte worked. On 1 February, Joe’s forty-first birthday and Charlotte’s thirty-first, Joe took Charlotte on a drive round Central Park in a limousine, plied her with Aquavit, presented her with a Cartier bracelet and invited her to Whale Cay. Charlotte accepted.

  In the early 1940s the island was at its most vibrant – a hive of activity, agricultural and social, with guests arriving for parties by the boatload. Charlotte loved the fun of Whale Cay and enjoyed helping to run the Great House. She thought Joe hilarious and magnificent. But increasingly she found island life too rugged and lonely; the hurricane turned out to be the last straw. Charlotte admitted also that, though she adored Joe, in the end she was ‘too rich fare’.

  Charlotte detected a sadness in Joe: there was something missing, she said, and this something was bound up in Wadley. ‘She had the heart of a child,’ Charlotte wrote, and, enigmatically: ‘She could charm the birds off the trees – but it wasn’t the birds she was after.’

  Joe’s girlfriends had to be good-looking and they had to be young, but that apart there was no discernible pattern to the women with whom she chose to live. From 1950 there was Jackki, a gregarious, bossy red-haired New Yorker in her early twenties. ‘Crazy and adorable,’ said Joe. When they met, Jackki was working as a manicurist in Miami, at a beauty salon that Joe visited to have the tips of her hair singed and her fingernails cut and buffed. One evening Jackki left work to find that her car had vanished and in its place was a brand-new Chevrolet, a gift from Joe. This was the opening gambit of a determined courtship, and Jackki was soon persuaded to move to Whale Cay. Jackki was an energetic organiser, remembered by many islanders for her thoughtfulness – she took a keen interest in the welfare of children on the island and was instrumental in setting up the Star of the Bahamas camp.

  Jackki shared Joe’s relish for mischief and adventure. When Joe heard that a friend in Miami was having the chief of the local fire brigade to dinner, she made a hoax call reporting a fire at her friend’s house. She and Jackki hid in the bushes outside to watch the scene of confusion when the engine roared up. In the early 1950s the two went on safari to Kenya with the composer Bart Howard’s friend Bud; it was twenty years since Joe had hunted game in India with another manicurist, Mabs Jenkins. The holiday in Africa, though, was a disaster, because Bud shot a lion and Joe did not. Joe returned furious.

  After Jackki there was Jorie, otherwise known as Chop, a shy black woman twenty-four years Joe’s junior. Joe said Jorie was ‘one of the nicest people I have ever known’ – and ‘unbelievably exciting’. They met at a New York poker party, and in 1957 Jorie, who had never before lived with a woman, left the bank at which she worked to join Joe on Whale Cay. By then the island population had shrunk to about 100. Jorie was a tomboy and she threw herself into all Joe’s ventures – she worked hard helping to run the island and she loved to go out in the boats. On Whale Cay, Joe said, Jorie ‘went from being someone who slept eighteen hours a day to someone very vital . . . she came to life.’ Joe pointed out that Jorie was thirty-four when she moved to the island, exactly the age Joe had been. Jorie afforded her a vicarious rebirth.

  One day in the late 1950s a sudden pain in the legs tore through Joe Carstairs’ invulnerability, and she let out a piercing scream from her room in the Great House on Whale Cay, an involuntary mortal – and feminine – cry. The servants concocted a potion (of her own urine and crushed leaves) to soothe her limbs. Though she had spent her life endeavouring to ignore it, Joe Carstairs was made of flesh and blood.

  Joe was for the next three decades to be assailed by reminders of her mortality. Her hair turned white and her body began to malfunction. She did her best to put a manly gloss on her ailments. She claimed, improbably, that her teeth were falling out because of the poor diet she had been forced to adopt in Ireland during the First World War. As the problems with her legs worsened, she said the aches and pains were caused by a hip injury sustained in a motorboat crash (in fact only her ribs had been damaged in her racing days, and the doctors – to her fury – attributed her pains to arthritis). When she was finally persuaded to undergo a hip operation she was eager to point out that the surgeon ‘did a lot of footballers’.

  Just as she resisted mortality, Joe wanted to believe herself, like Wadley, immune to social and historical forces. To a great extent, her money ensured that she was. When a friend remarked in the 1970s that times had changed she retorted, ‘You bet they have – not my times, though.’ Yet, by one reading at least, the movements of her life closely followed shifts in public attitudes: she threw herself into the limelight in the naughty Twenties, went into exile in the reproving Thirties, came out again during the Second World War (when manly qualities in women were briefly acceptable), returned to exile in its aftermath, and when she finally rejoined the wider world in the Sixties it was in part because times had again changed, and her brand of colonialism had had its day.

  Black Bahamians achieved a degree of emancipation and independence in the 1960s, and the islanders remaining on Whale Cay became increasingly disrespectful towards ‘the Boss’. The Reverend Prince Hepburn said that Joe asked him on three occasions to come over from Nassau to deal with women on the island who were getting drunk and hollering abuse at the Great House. ‘Instead of coming out and talking to your helpers,’ shouted Miss Martha, Joe’s favourite laundress, ‘you are in there sweethearting your women just like you.’ Each time, Hepburn said, he evicted the troublemakers from the island. It was a sad sign of Joe’s declining power that she felt unequal to dealing with trouble on Whale Cay herself. She was no longer able to control the behaviour of her people. While walking across the island one day she was appalled to find a couple copulating under a coconut palm just off the main road.

  Joe spent less and less time on Whale Cay. Instead she sailed to Miami on the St Pete, a naval supply vessel which she had converted to a houseboat. This floating home, moored in a quiet stretch of the Miami river, was a private island in miniature. Protected from the gossip of neighbours, Joe and Jorie lived there together for a time. The two would go out to nightclubs and parties, sometimes not returning to the boat until the early hours. Joe had a scare in the 1960s when she left Wadley on the St Pete one night and returned to find the boat had been burgled. ‘I should never have left him there,’ she said, and added: ‘There were a lot of fingermarks on him but they didn’t do anything to him. Wadley has frightened people, in a funny way.’ Her authority may have been weakened, but Wadley was as powerful as ever.

  Joe of course never admitted to any humiliation on Whale Cay. She eventually decided to leave the island, she said, because of the growth in drug trafficking in the Bahamas; the Berry Islands were a convenient stopping point on the route to Miami. Joe said she decided she had to get out before she was provoked into shooting someone. And besides, St Pe
te, on which she commuted from the island, ‘began to get sick and old’.

  In 1975 Joe sold Whale Cay, for just under $1 million, and for the second time in her life she cried: ‘It felt like a woman had died.’

  ‘I could’ve gone out and shot myself,’ Joe said. She was convinced that, without her, the island would wilfully revert to wilderness. ‘It wants to go back,’ she said. Estelle IV, her favourite racing boat, had been consigned to the bottom of a river on the island – ‘I left her there, to die.’

  The pain of leaving was so great that Joe could not afterwards bear to see beaches and rocks pictured on television. ‘I’ve become an absolute coward,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t face it. I can’t look something in the face that I’ve left behind.’ ‘Whale Cay was really a part of her,’ said Jorie.

  In the trauma of parting from the island, Joe threw much of her emotion on to the objects around her. She noted that the house she moved into in Miami ‘put itself out to please me in every way’; it ‘did its bit’, and at nights she would assure it aloud, ‘I love you, house.’ Joe took with her every stick of furniture from Whale Cay, and did not buy anything new. The penguins came too: ‘I don’t think they really know that there was any transition,’ she said. Friends thought it a peculiarly English, even Victorian, trait that she garnered and kept so much memorabilia. Joe displayed the photographs of her girlfriends – some 120 in all – on a glass-topped table. ‘There were one or two, of course,’ she remarked, ‘that I liked apart from sex.’