THE GHOST OF CAPT BILLY

January 1999 Table of Contents - Current Issue of The Abaco Journal - Abaco Bahamas' Home Page

THE GHOST OF CAPT BILLY ROBERTS...
by Sara S Parker

Ghost stories and profitable preservation are a way of life at historic New Plymouth, once the second largest city in The Bahamas. Established by American Loyalists in 1783, it is now home to about 500, mostly Loyalist descendants, in a proud cluster of pastel clapboards clinging tenaciously to the south-western tip of Green Turtle Cay, Abaco. Where wreckers once wreaked havoc on shipping, lobster fishing and tourism now vie for supremacy.

"Wally goes crazy if anyone wants to change anything!" admiringly confides a member of the very effective Architectural Preservation Foundation of Green Turtle Cay. Wally Davis owns and manages the beautifully restored New Plymouth Club and Inn right downtown opposite the magnificent Loyalist Memorial Sculpture Garden for which the town is renown.

Wally also hosts the ghost of Capt Billy Roberts, reported to watch over the Inn's guests and residents while rocking on his upstairs verandah. Wally knows historic surroundings, painstakingly restored for comfort and charm, are major attractions for the tourists who then patronise the rest of the Cay's offerings, especially the lobster.

This spring Wally's (and the Captain's) Inn was the very appropriate scene for the Foundation's major public effort, a Fund Raising Tasting of Wines and Non-Alcoholic Wine sponsored by The William Brewer Company Ltd and its subsidiary Bristol Cellars. Funds raised were used in October 1998 to restore New Plymouth's Old Gaol (jail). The aim of the elegant wine tasting was to spread the gospel of preservation on the cay and to every place the wine tasting guests lived or visited, says Mrs Kathleen Bethell, one of the eight founding members of the Foundation.

The $1,000 raised also was seed money, resulting in donations used immediately and now for restoring the Old Gaol and attracting new members, adds Kathy's husband and fellow Foundation founder Mr David Bethell, proprietor of the restored Plymouth Rock Liquors and Cafe and Ocean Blue Gallery. "Now that the weather has cooled down after a busy summer of tourists, we're working on restoring the Old Gaol, ordering hinges as apropos as possible. The beams are being shored up and there is major repair work such as cutting stones and antiquing the wooden doors," reports Mrs Bethell.

The town's business people do the work as volunteers because pristine historic sites are what tourists want to see, Mrs Bethell points out. Every shutter gleams with just the right shade of pastel paint. Every picket is pointed just so. The roofs are famous for quaint gingerbread details. Perhaps because they have been kept so well through generations, many of the houses are even older than they appear to be.

According to Ms Grace Turner of the Bahamas Department of Archives, speaker during the Foundation's William Brewer Wine Tasting, the Foundation's preservation survey discovered that many of the New Plymouth houses, once believed to be post-1929 Hurricane vintage, are actually more than 100 years old.

Even New Plymouth's gaol, now being restored, is much older than previously estimated. Experts now date the Old Gaol and "...especially ornate stone work in the roof of its latrine, back 150 to 200 years, right into plantation days, instead of 1910," says Ms Turner, curator of Nassau's Pompey Museum of Slavery (formerly Vendue House).

The Foundation team studied 149 New Plymouth structures, identifying no less than 80 of historic significance. Each was then analysed for architectural features and current use. Detailed scale drawings of three of the historic structures were prepared, along with video and audio taped interviews with the townspeople who have special memories and knowledge of New Plymouth history.

The New Plymouth survey, says Ms Turner, "is a pioneering project, way ahead of Nassau." She adds: "Many visitors say they are attracted by the built environment, which is man-made: size, colour, closeness...Once it goes, a very important part of our culture dies with it."

According to Mr Bethell, the New Plymouth survey is the first of its kind in the Family Islands. Its goal is the designation of New Plymouth as a historic district. Local businesses, citizens and visitors to Green Turtle Cay funded the Foundation's preservation survey, directed by volunteers Professor David Woodcock of the Texas A & M Historic Imaging Laboratory and preservation architect Jack Pyburn, AIA, of Atlanta. The information gathered, after assembly at the Texas A & M College of Architecture's Historic Resource Imaging Laboratory, will be submitted to the Bahamas Department of Archives, the Bahamas National Trust's Historic Preservation Committee and, of course, the Foundation at New Plymouth.

Why is historic preservation so important? The Foundation's survey report explains: "New Plymouth is directly linked to its visual character. The overwhelming response from tourists is that the historic character is one of the major reasons they come here, not once but over and over. Tourism is like the economies which have preceded it: sisal, pineapple, timber. Protecting and developing any economic resource requires care and thought to assure it is not destroyed by progress but rather that the resource contributes to progress while being preserved.

"We of the survey team hope these efforts will make a meaningful contribution to the efforts and commitment of the citizens of New Plymouth to carefully manage and protect its historic resources in the name of progress."

"If the enthusiasm, energy and appreciation we saw demonstrated during our wine tasting continues as it was at the New Plymouth Inn tasting, the future looks very bright for historic and other fine things such as wines in the Abacos," said William Brewer's marketing representative Mr David Bain. His wine team, including noted wine consultant Tim Clarke, and Arthur Johnson of Bristol Cellars, tutored area hotel and restaurant staff in wine lore and themselves soaked in local lore such as the ghost of Capt Billy Roberts who allegedly haunts the New Plymouth Inn in a protective, preservative way.

Asked about the ghostly captain, Wally Davis pauses in his efforts to serve an excellent dinner and newly accustomed wines to a full house from the tasting. He says, perfectly straight-faced: "There is something to is, you know. At least half a dozen different guests have asked about the 'old sea captain upstairs' or mentioned the balcony rocker rocking with no-one in it. We tell them it may indeed be Capt Billy Roberts, still protecting his original home, built in the 1830's."

Capt Billy's portrait ironically hangs in the dining room of the New Plymouth Inn, perhaps an eternal temptation to the ghost of the man who, according to a local legend, "ended his life in the Inn by self-imposed starvation, fearful his many enemies in the village of New Plymouth had poisoned his food supplies. Legend has it that under the Inn, or on the grounds, is his sea chest containing the clandestine treasures of many adventurous voyages."

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