Never name a vessel after one that has shipwrecked or sunk.
This is not merely a suggestion but a powerful maritime superstition. For that reason, vessels with the same moniker as their lost predecessors often have the Roman numeral II, III, or IV after their names.
A violent shipwreck at the entrance to Georgetown Harbor on Thanksgiving Day 1996 sank the newly built thirty-five-foot wooden schooner Frolic on her maiden voyage as she sailed down the coast from New Hampshire. Her owner, sailing alone, was never found.
The tragedy appears unrelated to past maritime events until one considers the eerily similar shipwreck of an eerily similar vessel with the same name in another ocean nearly a century and a half earlier.
Was the similarity coincidental? Or was the fate of the new schooner Frolic sealed when she was given the same name as a larger schooner that shipwrecked and sank in 1850?
Though other vessels have borne the name Frolic, the parallels between the two schooners are uncanny. The Frolic that shipwrecked in 1850 was a wooden-hulled Chesapeake Bay Baltimore clipper schooner. Only five years old, she was on her first voyage to San Francisco when she shipwrecked off the northern California coast, ramming a rocky reef off Point Cabrillo.
The Frolic that shipwrecked in 1996 was a wooden-hulled sailing vessel custom-designed in the style of a Chesapeake Bay schooner. Less than a year old, she was on her maiden voyage when she shipwrecked off the South Carolina coast, crashing into the granite rocks of the north jetty at the entrance to Georgetown Harbor. Each of the vessels was under full sail at night and sank quickly when she suffered her deadly collision. And the captain of each of the vessels was involved in her design and construction—and remained her only captain from her inception to her sinking.
When her keel was laid in 1844, the Frolic already had a captain and a purpose. She was custom-built for the Boston firm Augustine Heard & Company to run opium from Bombay to Hong Kong. Instead of having the Frolic built at a local shipyard, A. Heard & Co. hired Baltimore shipbuilders William and George Gardiner, as Baltimore was a focal point for the construction of fast ships that could carry large cargoes. Captain Edward Horatio Faucon was captain of the Frolic from her construction. During the design phase, he was the one who made all decisions regarding her rigging.
Launched in 1845, the Frolic was highly successful as an opium trader until the British East India Company began using steamships for transporting opium. By 1847, the savings of using steamships over clipper ships was $1.28 per chest. The British East India Company then flooded the China opium market with its less expensively purchased opium. As a result, the Frolic and other clipper ships were obsolete for the opium trade. What commercial venture was next?
Captain Faucon, still master of the Frolic, was competitive and adventurous. A. Heard & Co. gave him a change of destination. Now, instead of bringing opium to China, he carried exotic goods from Hong Kong to nourish the tastes of the gold-rush boom town of San Francisco. The Frolic was loaded with a grand cargo of Chinese goods—silk fans, brass weights for shopkeepers to measure their wares, candied fruits, tortoise-shell combs, toothbrushes, ivory napkin rings, silver tinderboxes, porcelain bowls, mother-of-pearl gaming pieces, exquisite silks, finely detailed trunks, marble-topped tables, jewelry, and even a prefabricated two-room house with oyster-shell windows. The sole non-Chinese cargo was over a thousand bottles of ale from Edinburgh.
Tuesday, July 25, 1850
After sailing six thousand miles across the Pacific on a forty-four-day passage from Hong Kong, the Frolic was traveling off the northern California coast. By the light of the full moon, the mountains twenty miles in the distance were very clear. The fog just ahead, however, hid the low coastal terrace and the offshore rocks of a dangerous reef.
The first officer saw the reef and rushed to tell Captain Faucon, who turned the wheel instantly to port. It was too late. As the Frolic’s stern crashed into a rock, a huge gash was torn in her hull and her rudder broke off.
All twenty-six of the Frolic’s crew survived the initial impact. Six men, however, would not leave the ship to board the two lifeboats. Those half-dozen stayed up in the ship’s rigging. Captain Faucon and the rest of the crew rowed the two boats to the mouth of the Big River, where the captain explored two miles into the interior without finding anyone. At that point, some of the crew, now safely on land, did not want to get back into their rowboat, as it was leaking badly. Those crew members chose to travel for help by land, while Captain Faucon and the others used the intact rowboat to row to the town of Bodega, north of San Francisco. From there, they slept on the beaches and ate mussels until they reached San Francisco. No one knows what became of the crew members who stayed in the rigging of the Frolic or those who chose to separate from Captain Faucon and travel by land.
The day he arrived in San Francisco, Captain Faucon was interviewed by the Daily Alta California. The following day, the paper reported his arrival and his estimated value of the Frolic’s cargo of Chinese merchandise at $150,000.
The Frolic lay on the ocean floor off Point Cabrillo for many years, the only known wreck site of a Baltimore clipper. Captain Faucon went on to serve the Union during the Civil War and later made his fortune in the salvage business. He never forgot the terrible evening when he shipwrecked on a rocky reef at night in the great schooner Frolic.
Nearly a century and a half later, the 1996-built Frolic, a thirty-five-foot likeness of the ninety-seven-foot ship, met the same fate on Georgetown Harbor’s north jetty.
Built in the late 1800s, the north jetty stretches from the tip of North Island way out into the Atlantic. The south jetty, built next, runs parallel to the north jetty, extending into the Atlantic from South Island. Between the jetties is the entrance to the shipping channel that leads into Winyah Bay and connects Georgetown Harbor with the Atlantic.
Constructed to keep a sand bar from building up at the channel entrance, the jetties were made of hundreds of great granite rocks. Each stone, some the size of boulders, was brought by train from upper South Carolina to Georgetown. The stones were then taken by tugboat to North Island, where the jetty construction was based.
After construction of the jetties, the sand bar that had prevented deep-draft ships from accessing Georgetown Harbor was no longer a hazard to navigation. In conjunction with diligent dredging, the jetties kept the channel deep enough for giant freighters to reach Georgetown Harbor from the Atlantic.
But while the jetties remedied the hazard to navigation posed by the sand bar, their construction created another hazard—two rock walls stretching out into the ocean. The north and south jetties form a jagged silhouette against the horizon at low tide. At high tide, however, when the jetties are nearly covered, more than one vessel has crashed into the jagged boulders.
That was the fate of the 1996 Frolic.
Wednesday, November 27, 1996, Thanksgiving Eve
The Frolic and her captain were on a night passage down the southern half of the South Carolina coast. The open Atlantic lay to port. To starboard lay the bays, inlets, channels, and wide, sandy beaches of the Palmetto State.
The Frolic had already passed one of the trickiest and most dangerous legs of her journey down the East Coast. Her captain, who was also her sole crew member, had successfully navigated the treacherous seas off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a literal ship graveyard legendary for the many vessels wrecked over hundreds of years on the treacherous shoals and rocks. The sail down the South Carolina coast, which had fewer hazards to navigation, was relaxing by comparison.
Following the coastline at high tide, the captain kept the Frolic on an eastward path close along the shore of North Island. Hidden ahead in the darkness were the huge, unyielding rocks of the island’s granite jetty.
Sometime during the early morning of November 28, the Frolic slammed into the north jetty. The impact tore a two-foot gash in her port side.
At about eight that morning, the thirty-five-foot schooner was found partly submerged in the Atlantic at the entrance to Georgetown Harbor near the north jetty rocks, the huge gash in her bright green hull a harsh testimony to her crash. Her sails were up, indicating that the crash was unexpected and that she was probably traveling fast. A small amount of debris and four life vests were discovered floating around her. No one was found aboard or nearby.
By Monday, the home port and owner registration of the Frolic were still a mystery. Where did she hail from? To whom did she belong? Who had been aboard?
The seas were rough. The water around the jetties, which create deep tidal swells on the calmest of days, was even more turbulent. Underwater visibility was meager. Divers could determine little about the wooden-hulled sailing vessel except that she seemed to be new and well maintained and was named the Frolic.
In a front-page article on the accident and search, the Georgetown Times reported that the Frolic had last been spotted near Oak Island, North Carolina, with apparently one man on board. Was he aboard when the Frolic crashed into the north jetty? Or had he fallen or been knocked overboard miles earlier?
One week later, the Times reported that the owner of the Frolic had been identified as Reginald L. Butler of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This discovery was made after Captain Ronnie Campbell led a dive on the wreck during which two divers detected a hull number in the boat’s companionway. That discovery led to the identification of the Frolic’s owner.
The 1996 Frolic was, like her predecessor, a Chesapeake Bay–style deadrise or deep-V-hull schooner. Baltimore clippers such as the 1845 Frolic were modified Chesapeake Bay coastal trading schooners. The Baltimore clipper class of ships, with their sharp-lined hulls and billowing sails, were perhaps the most beautiful sailing vessels ever built. The word clipper accurately described the speed of the sleek schooners, whose deep draft enabled them to sail closer to the wind than other vessels.
Butler’s 1996 Frolic was built at the Landing School of Boatbuilding and Design in Arundel, Kennebunkport, Maine. Boatbuilding faculty at the school did not recall that Reginald Butler ever mentioned designing his boat as a replica of the ill-fated 1845 Frolic. But they did remember that Reg, as they fondly called him, was very active in the design of his schooner.
“Reg did not model his boat after the older Frolic,” shared a member of the faculty. “It was modeled after his mind’s eye from the guy who helped build it as a Chesapeake Bay deadrise-type boat.”
Unintentional though it may have been, Butler’s custom-designed 1996 schooner emerged as a one-third-scale ringer of the 1845 Frolic.
“But whether Butler was actually on the 35 foot wooden sailboat when it sank,” reported Kelly M. Burch of the Times, “is still in question, according to Coast Guard officers in Georgetown and Miami. Butler’s body was not found on the boat by divers from a private salvage company Wednesday morning.
“It is speculated that Butler may have hired someone to pilot the Frolic to another port in Florida or loaned the vessel to a friend. Butler has not been reported missing. The Coast Guard was attempting to contact his family members Wednesday morning to discover his whereabouts.”
“Nobody has heard from him, but nobody has reported him missing,” said Chief Petty Officer Mark Dobson with the Charleston Coast Guard Station. “We’re presuming he was going from New Hampshire to Florida for the winter.
“His residence in Portsmouth was closed off and boarded up for the winter,” Dobson said. “A lot of people from up north bring their boats down for the winter and take them back in the spring. But usually somebody on the other end is waiting for their arrival.”
A short time later, Captain Campbell pulled the Frolic away from the jetty, out of the ocean, through Winyah Bay, and into the mouth of the Sampit River, grounding her at East Bay Street Landing in Georgetown. The once-beautiful Frolic lay aground, the gash in her port side now large enough to walk through. Irreparable, she waited to be broken up. Little was salvageable.
The search for Butler’s body continued, to no avail. Besides the Thanksgiving disappearance of Butler, several Georgetown residents perished at sea and in local waters during November and December, also resulting in massive searches.
About a month later, according to Burch, the Frolic’s dinghy was found near Bull Island, some thirty-five miles south of the jetty on which the Frolic crashed.
Sometime after the shipwreck, the owners of Georgetown’s waterfront River Room Restaurant requested the bow of the Frolic for the restaurant’s extensive collection of maritime antiques and local historic nautical memorabilia. They mounted the bow in a place of honor facing east toward the Sampit River, Winyah Bay, and the Atlantic.
But what of Butler?
His schooner, like her nineteenth-century predecessor, met her demise on ocean-covered rocks close to shore but far from her destination. Did Butler die here, too? Or had he fallen or been knocked overboard by the rigging miles prior, leaving his vessel to sail unmanned onto the jetty rocks? And why was his dinghy found so far ahead of his wreck?
“None of his people came down after the accident to see what happened,” said Captain Campbell. “There are some things we will never know.
“There are other boats named Frolic,” he added, “and when I see one, that wreck always comes to mind.”
Remember—never name a vessel after one that has shipwrecked or sunk.