The Georgetown County coast abounds with seafaring tales and mysteries, from colonial pirate stories right up to present-day adventures. Among the latter is the saga of the ill-fated schooner Fiddler’s Green.
The twin Crayton brothers were born in 1915. Christened Richard and Samuel, Dickie and Sammy grew up loving boats and the sea. Georgetown County, with its busy international seaport, wind-swept barrier islands, and five winding rivers, was the base for their countless maritime adventures.
When the hurricane of 1916 approached Georgetown County, the young brothers and their mother were on Pawleys Island at the seaside boardinghouse she ran there. A man driving a horse-drawn buckboard stopped at the boardinghouse and told Mrs. Crayton that, but for him, she and her baby boys were the last people on the narrow barrier island. Due to all the last-minute work of preparing the boardinghouse for the storm, Mrs. Crayton had not realized that everyone else was gone. Since no other transportation was available, she loaded her twin sons on the man’s buckboard and left Pawleys Island for the mainland. They crossed the narrow bridge linking the sections of earthen causeway just in time. Shortly after their passage, the causeway was washed away as the hurricane ravaged the island.
This early incident set the tone for Dickie and Sammy’s adventures, including that of the Fiddler’s Green.
The legend of Fiddler’s Green is an ancient one. It tells how an old sailor ready to leave the sea can find utopia on land. He should begin walking inland carrying an oar on his shoulder, finally traveling far enough that the locals have never seen boats, oars, or the ocean. When he comes upon a lovely township in the heart of a beautiful countryside and someone looks curiously at his oar and asks what he is carrying, he will know he has arrived in Fiddler’s Green. There, he will be given his own seat beside the village inn. His pipe will always be filled with fragrant tobacco, and his glass of ale will magically fill up anytime he drinks the last drop. He will savor his ale and pipe while watching village maidens dance to fiddle music on the village green before the inn.
Fiddler’s Green, the sailors’ legendary destination after leaving the sea, was the perfect name for a vessel that came out of the sea to rest high and dry on the south end of Pawleys Island.
Fiddler’s Green was a fifty-foot wooden-hulled schooner. Made almost entirely of red Honduran mahogany, she was as beautiful a craft as ever plied the Atlantic. Launched in 1937, she was well seasoned, widely traveled, and outfitted with a new diesel engine by the time this story took place.
The schooner belonged to a Maryland physician, Edmund B. Kelly of Baltimore. Dr. Kelly and three companions were taking her down the East Coast before heading farther south. Their destination was the island of Trinidad, eleven miles off the coast of Venezuela in the southern Caribbean.
Little did Dr. Kelly and his crew realize that this would be the last journey for Fiddler’s Green. They had no way of knowing the schooner would never reach Trinidad.
Most of the first leg of the journey involved sailing or motoring down the Intracoastal Waterway. On that fateful January night in 1953, however, Fiddler’s Green was motoring down the South Carolina coast in the unpredictable Atlantic rather than the sheltered inland waterway. Her engine was running because the night was too calm for her sails to be of any use. With the moon in its first quarter, visibility was moderate.
The night passage along the four-and-a-half-mile Pawleys Island shore should have been uneventful. Fiddler’s Green would have passed the island without ever breaching the shore had it not been for one catastrophic oversight.
During their passage south, the four-member crew of Fiddler’s Green took turns with the responsibility of four-hour night watches while the others slept. On that fateful night, the watch changed as the schooner cut through the dark Atlantic off Pawleys. The crew member whose watch was ending unthinkingly left a metal flashlight near the compass just before he relinquished the helm to the next watch. The crew member whose watch was beginning did not notice the flashlight. If he had, he would have realized that the metal object had immediately caused a serious deviation in the compass reading. As he carefully piloted Fiddler’s Green according to the compass, he had no idea he was steering her closer and closer to Pawleys Island.
Had the night been windy enough for sailing, the sound of breakers crashing on the island might have warned him of the dangerous proximity of the beach. Instead, the powerful diesel engine obliterated the sound of the waves.
Minutes later, there came a low grinding sound as the long, graceful keel plowed deeply into the golden sand. Fiddler’s Green had run aground on the south end of Pawleys Island.
The tide was higher than usual that night, and Fiddler’s Green sailed onto sand that was rarely submerged. When her keel plowed into the bottom, the schooner still had a chance to get back to sea. But that opportunity was lost when everyone aboard woke up and another well-meaning crew member tossed the anchor onto the highest part of the south end. As the tide went out, the anchor held fast and the keel nestled deeper and more firmly into the hard-packed sand.
When morning dawned, the tide had gone out, leaving the twenty-eight-ton schooner beached far from the water on the highest part of the south end of Pawleys. It might be months, even seasons, before the tide rose that high again. And accessibility was not good. Far beyond the sand lay Pawleys Creek to the east, the south-end swash to the south, the Atlantic to the east, and a distant parking lot to the north.
The tug Robert W. and the Coast Guard cutter Travis motored up from Georgetown Harbor to assist Fiddler’s Green. Neither vessel was able to rescue the beached schooner. Sand had washed in around her keel, holding her fast. Crew members from the tug and the cutter were quoted in the Georgetown Times as saying the schooner’s keel “was set in concrete.”
Dr. Kelly’s insurance company hired Captain Harry V. Salmons of Salmons Co., Marine Contractors, to salvage Fiddler’s Green. Unwilling to accept the schooner after the estimated costs of refloating, dry-docking, and major repairs, Dr. Kelly accepted fifteen thousand dollars from his insurance company and abandoned the vessel. Too far from the water, her long, graceful keel wedged deeply in the sand, the thirty-thousand-dollar schooner was sold by the insurance company for less than five thousand dollars.
Dickie and Sammy Crayton were by now seasoned mariners with the hard-earned title of captain before their names. Along with Beverly Sawyer and William F. Rutland, they purchased Fiddler’s Green from the insurance company and began the daunting task of getting her back to sea in one piece before sailing her down to her new home in Georgetown Harbor.
No one doubted that the brothers could save Fiddler’s Green, even though the insurance company had given up. Dickie and Sammy knew the owners, captains, and crews of every tugboat and shrimp trawler in Georgetown County. Within that vast array of men and boats were more than enough manpower, horsepower, experience, skill, and knowledge to float nearly any vessel that had the misfortune to go aground. They just had to wait until the conditions were right.
Dickie and Sammy were ready for the challenge. They were also patient. They knew that floating the schooner would require a precise tide, wind direction, and phase of the moon. Fiddler’s Green was theirs. After she was unearthed from her sandy hold and repaired, she was going to sea again.
In the meantime, guarding Fiddler’s Green was an ongoing task. In order to prevent would-be salvagers from dismantling and pillaging the schooner, she had to be manned at all times. If she was left alone, miscreants could remove her delicate gauges, brass cleats, pulleys, hundreds of yards of line, sails—the list was endless. Thieves could break the glass in her hatches, climb aboard, and steal to their hearts’ content. The schooner’s dinghy alone—a four-man vessel of solid mahogany—was a prize.
Dickie and Sammy made sure they or someone they trusted was with Fiddler’s Green at all times. They spent those many hours painstakingly repairing some of the damage that had occurred when the schooner grounded.
After over a month of guarding Fiddler’s Green around the clock, the eve of her floating finally arrived. The following morning promised a higher-than-usual lunar high tide, a strong west wind, and clear skies. Powerful tugboats and commercial shrimp trawlers from Georgetown were scheduled to arrive the next morning to pull the schooner back into the Atlantic.
Their vigil nearly over, Dickie and Sammy were in high spirits, ready to get Fiddler’s Green to Georgetown. Only one more night of guarding her lay before them. Their companions had finished their watches and were not scheduled to return until morning for the refloating. In the day’s excitement, Dickie and Sammy had not made any arrangements for supper. Now, they were ravenous.
Since the moment they had claimed Fiddler’s Green, she had not been left for even a short time without someone watching her. Surely, they reasoned, it would be safe to depart for half an hour so both of them could take a break and drive into Georgetown for a bite to eat. The Whistling Pig, located on the Pawleys Island side of Georgetown, was only fifteen minutes away. The Pig made the best and fastest hamburgers around. The temptation was unbearable—fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back for a delicious, mouth-watering hamburger. Surely, it would be all right to leave the schooner for less than an hour on this last day.
Their decision made, Dickie and Sammy walked across the sand a good half-mile to where their car was parked. Everyone, they reasoned, knew how closely the schooner had been guarded for the past weeks. No one would dare breach her resting place now. Besides, what could vandals do in such a short period? They would not have time to carry anything away. They would have to walk too far, and there was no cover, only open beach.
Thirty-five minutes later, Dickie and Sammy arrived back at their parking place near the south end. Having eaten their burgers on the way, they now looked forward to the walk back to the schooner. But as soon as they got out of the car, they knew something was not right. As they neared the vessel, a horrible sight came into focus.
Hanging from the tilted mast was a body!
Dickie and Sammy broke into a run. Who could have hanged himself on the vessel, and why?
When they reached Fiddler’s Green, the sight was even more macabre up close. The body, silhouetted by the setting sun, swung slowly in the breeze. Wordlessly, the brothers cut the rope holding it.
When the form fell to the sand, Dickie and Sammy received an even bigger surprise. This was no body! Someone had stuffed one of the schooner’s foul-weather outfits—boots, hood, and all—and suspended it from the mast.
One of their friends must have played a joke on them. The brothers immediately began to look for a note or evidence of the identity of who had pulled the prank.
They found not a single clue.
They did discover, however, that the schooner’s fine dinghy was gone. No drag marks crossed the sand. The dinghy was very heavy. From all the recent activity, footprints were everywhere. Had someone—or several someones—carried the weighty dinghy to the distant parking lot? Or had they carried it to the ocean or the creek and rowed away?
Carrying did not seem feasible—the dinghy was just too heavy. The incoming tide had covered up any telltale signs that might have been at the water’s edge. Had someone been watching all the time, waiting for just the right moment? If so, how on earth had they found time to carry off the dinghy and prepare the dummy and haul it up in the air? It was not humanly possible.
Dickie and Sammy also found it was not humanly possible to float Fiddler’s Green and sail her away. She was grounded too fast at too remote a location. They completed their salvaging by stripping Fiddler’s Green right there on the beach at the south end of Pawleys Island.
Neither hide nor hair was ever seen of the missing mahogany dinghy. Its inexplicable disappearance and the eerie hanging of the foul-weather gear remain mysteries to this day.