The late Ira Walton, a seafarer from Cayman Brac who worked on board the Fair Weather schooner, which is undergoing repairs before being brought to Cayman, tells in an oral history recorded in 1991 of a run-in with actor Errol Flynn on the boat.
In the oral history, kept by the Cayman Islands National Archive, Walton describes the encounter, which occurred in Ocho Rios and Port Antonio, Jamaica, in 1952 when Fair Weather was featured in the movie ‘Road to Bali’, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, in 1952.
Flynn, who had a reputation as a hellraiser, was a friend of the Fair Weather’s owner Sir Anthony Jenkinson, who had met him in Hollywood while working as a journalist in the US.
Walton recalled, “People believe [Flynn] might be a good actor but he was one of the worst little dogs on Earth. Yes, he was bad. And every bar room in Ocho Rios and Port Antonio you visit, you could find his and his wife’s picture stuck up there, naked.
“He had a yacht called the Zaca, and he had a crew of people from the French West Indies islands. He would come aboard in the evening time, drunk, and get out there on the board deck and strip his clothes off naked and jump overboard.”
Flynn had his own dock for the Zaca, Walton said. One night, while anchored offshore on the Fair Weather, the forecast was for “pretty bad” weather, so Walton tied the ship off Flynn’s dock.
“We were down below. We had to sleep by lantern because we didn’t have no electricity… During the night, I heard this thing bucking alongside and I heard a voice calling and accusing me, accusing us, of being drunk, gambling and smoking ganja. I could hear it was Flynn’s voice.
“And I had a dagger on me. I made it out of one of those rasper files and I asked him to hold on alongside till I get on deck. But he must have heard by the tone of my voice that … I meant trouble, and by the time I got on the deck, he had pushed away from the side, and I told him some real bad things.”
Walton said he didn’t use marijuana and wouldn’t allow anyone to take liquor aboard the boat.
Flynn complained to Anthony Jenkinson, who came by the boat the next day to talk to Walton, and told him what Flynn had said.
Walton said he replied to him, “I’ll tell you what, one part of that is true, the other part is a lie, because we don’t smoke nor drink nothing illegal aboard here, but as far as his telling you I … would’ve cut his throat or do something bad, I told him that and I still mean it.”
Later that day, Flynn sent a member of his staff to the Fair Weather with a tray carrying whisky, but Walton said he sent him on his way, saying, “We don’t drink whisky, we drink white rum, take that back.”
But, he said, he and the actor later made up and became “very good friends”.
When Walton and the Fair Weather were leaving, Flynn followed the boat in his little plane, “circling me until I went down Port Antonio Bay and I haven’t seen him since. Well, he died afterwards, I understand, but he was a bad man.”
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