Dear Sir,

With reference to your February 12 article, it should be pointed out that Graham Foster’s otherwise excellent mural at the Elbow Beach Hotel is inaccurate in showing an all-white crew in the rescue boat involved in the 1915 Pollockshields shipwreck. In reality, the men manning the rescue boat were mostly blacks, with only two white persons — Antonio Marshall, who had the tiller, and a Royal Navy sailor from HMS Suffolk, who was in the bow of the boat. See pages 165-166 of my 2014 book Empire & Onion-patch: a history of Bermuda from 1898 to 1918 .

A more detailed account of the heroic episode can be found in the Governor’s official dispatch of September 13, 1915 to the Secretary of State for the Colonies (in the Bermuda Government Archives, CS 6/1/29).

A number of other Royal Navy men from HMS Suffolk , as well as Canadian soldiers from the wartime garrison, assisted on the beach and in the surf in getting the ship’s crew and passenger to dry land. But Captain Boothe, of the Pollockshields , had sadly perished earlier during the prolonged crisis, in an attempt to give a life preserver to one of his men on the wave-washed deck of the stricken vessel.

JONATHAN LAND EVANS