Schooner Integrity

The Integrity was one of the best known American sailing craft of the 1960s; built ina famous boatyard in Dartmouth, New England, not far from where Slocum built the Spray, she was the dream boat of her owner, Waldo Howland. She cruised the West Indies and crossed the Atlantic to visit Ireland and the English south coast. Then she was sold and there began a chain of events which led to adventure, chicanery and eventually tragedy. Abandoned by a scratch crew in a gale, drifting dismasted round the ocean, boarded and stripped; taken in tow by a Fleetwood trawler and sailed into Turks Island: the subject of an endless legal battle for salvage: mysteriously sunk at her moorings on the day she was to be auctioned: refloated and sold--a leaking hulk swinging to her mooring.It was here that Frank Mulville came on her and with his small yacht Iskra offered to tow her to Cat Island, further up the Bahamas chain. The only man able to tell the story of her last voyage, Frank was to meet Waldo and also members of the crew who abandoned her; he has pieced together the whole story and given a first-hand account of its climax.