Low-Wage Crew Paid the Ultimate Price

Maxwell Bhikham and Alan George gave their lives for $5 a day. Or $13, if you include tips.

Bhikham was a Guyanese deckhand, age 28. George, 23, was a steward from Grenada. On Oct. 27, 1998, they were two of 31 worried crew members aboard the schooner Fantome in the waters off Honduras.

The Fantome was not a typical cruise ship. Instead of an 800-foot, 2,000-passenger marvel of ‘90s engineering, the Fantome was a 282-foot, four-masted, 64-cabin schooner built in 1927, converted into a commercial passenger ship in 1969. Because its owners sailed it only among foreign ports in the Caribbean, it had never been inspected by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Similarly, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, the company behind the ship in the U.S., is no typical cruise line.

While the companies behind those big Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships trade on the New York Stock Exchange, Miami-based Windjammer Barefoot Cruises places its customers on a fleet of six reconditioned sailing vessels, and is a family operation controlled by 75-year-old Capt. Michael Burke, who founded the company more than 40 years ago. Burke’s Miami home is a high-walled castle, with sharks circling in a salt-water moat.

But like its larger competitors, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises relies on a combination of American tourists, foreign registration and low-wage workers from poor countries.

Though roughly 90% of its passengers were Americans, the Fantome flew the flag of Equatorial Guinea. The entity that owned the ship and employed the crew was Fantome S.A., a Panamanian corporation. Other ship-related components were ascribed to Florida-based International Maritime Resources Inc., whose president is Michael D. Burke, son of the Burke patriarch.

Among the crew, 11 had been recruited from Guyana, where unemployment is rampant and the gross domestic product is $2,500 per person per year. Living standards are comparable in Grenada (home of four crewmen) and St. Vincent (home of four others).

Others came from Jamaica, Honduras, Antigua, Trinidad, Nicaragua, St. Lucia and Panama. The 32-year-old captain, Guyan March, was British. The 46-year-old chief engineer, Constantin Bucur, was Romanian.

Documents obtained by The Times, which Windjammer’s attorney would neither confirm nor deny the validity of, show the captain’s salary as $4,100 monthly, the chief engineer’s at $2,800 monthly, two mates and another engineer at $2,000 to $2,200.

Then came the rest, who shared in tips that Windjammer’s Cobb estimated at $200 to $250 per person in a typical month, $350 in “a great month.”

Bhikham and George each made $150 per month--$5 a day, or $13 if you assume $250 monthly in tips. From the same document, here’s a sampling of their shipmates:

* Carpenter Deodatt Jallim, 31, of Guyana: $400 monthly.

* Deckhand Colin August, 35, of Guyana: $175 monthly.

* Carpenter Steadbert Burke, 36, of Jamaica: $300 monthly.

* Engineer Mohamed Farouk Roberts, 29, of Guyana: $300 monthly.

* Cook Vanil Fender, 38, of Jamaica: $250 monthly.

That week in late October 1998, about 100 passengers had signed on for a six-day cruise from the Gulf of Honduras to Belize’s Turneffe Islands, paying roughly $1,000 to $1,500 per person.

With weather reports warning of impending Hurricane Mitch, the Fantome scrubbed its cruise and stopped in Belize City to put the passengers ashore, along with 10 nonessential crew members, including all females. Then the ship headed north, away from the storm.

Capt. March, who had spent 10 years rising through company ranks, remained in steady satellite-phone contact with Michael D. Burke in Miami, consulting on strategy and weather updates.

When the hurricane shifted course, the ship did, too--now heading south, toward Honduras’ Bay Islands.

When the storm changed direction again and drew within 50 miles of Roatan, March and Burke conferred again, and the ship headed east. But the hurricane found it. Forty-foot waves. Winds of 200 mph. About 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 27, the ship satellite phone went dead.

No bodies from the Fantome were recovered--just bits of splintered wood, life rafts and several life vests, scavenged two days later from the island of Guanaja, 10 miles from the Fantome’s last known position.

Windjammer Barefoot Cruises held a memorial service in the islands and started a trust fund for crew members’ families, pledging to forward revenue from sales of commemorative T-shirts, CDs and posters on the Windjammer Internet site. And it began making death-settlement offers, many of which were accepted.

However, Miami maritime attorney William Huggett contacted victims’ families and filed federal suits alleging negligence, seeking $1 million or more per family. Windjammer Cruises denies any negligence and argues that the cases don’t belong in a U.S. court.

The senior Burke has maintained that “we took the only reasonable course we had available. . . . But doing everything right is no guarantee that the results are going to be successful.”

Huggett also complains that the families that agreed to the earliest settlements were bought off cheaply.

James A. Cobb, a New Orleans-based attorney for Windjammer, asserts that the range of these offers--from $36,000 to $250,000--depended largely on the number of dependents left behind and the crew member’s salary.

But he acknowledged that, as in many death-settlement cases, the company’s offers have climbed gradually since those early weeks.