A maritime tragedy on Bermuda’s reefs that claimed five lives 56 years ago but was lost to history has come to light in the first detailed account of the shipwreck to be compiled.

David Rose, a retired policeman, was still relatively new to the island in 1967 when the island awoke on December 2 to news that a yacht, the Ramona, had foundered on the northern reefs with half her crew lost.

Mr Rose, who contributes crime stories to the website of the Bermuda Ex-Police Officer's Association, recalled seeing the shipwreck after it was finally brought to shore by three Bermudians who had purchased and salvaged the vessel.

“It’s been with me ever since, what I saw,” Mr Rose said. “I recall going up to Dockyard on my moped to take a look. It was a beautiful three-masted schooner, with valuable paintings inside that I could see. She was in terrible condition and full of sand.”

He decided to trawl through archives of The Royal Gazette and interview the last of the trio who brought the yacht to shore, spending months amassing the story.

The wreck provoked a scandal after survivors accused the captain of drunkenness and incompetence and the matter went before a Bermuda Marine Board of Inquiry.

Four of the dead were from St Lucia and said to be teenagers.

Mr Rose said: “During the night, through 12 hours out there through the storm, the four threw themselves overboard, or are alleged to have done.

“They were never properly identified, and none of the families of these deceased teenagers appear to have been notified of their circumstances until a nephew of one of them was employed in Bermuda.

“He spent four years here. When he got back to London there was a group of St Lucians living there. He told an uncle about Bermuda, who asked him if he knew about what happened to his other uncle here.”

Mr Rose said the man subsequently visited Bermuda and “came looking for the story — but he found great difficulty on finding out anything”.

The four were buried in the cemetery of the St Paul's Anglican Church in Paget. Also lost in the shipwreck was a doctor who hailed from Canada.

Mr Rose added: “I found people with vague memories of it. But nobody really knew the story.”

The account is now available online through the ex-police site, edited by retired Chief Inspector Roger Sherratt.

Just one reference to the Ramona appears in the last few decades of the Gazette, in a story referencing divers who hoped to salvage 30,000lb of lead ballast left from the wreck.

The ill-fated vessel, registered in the Bahamas, had set off from Nova Scotia on November 28, 1967, bound for St Lucia via Bermuda.

Five days later and believed to have misjudged the North Rock beacon, the 120ft vessel was wrecked on the island’s northwestern reefs.

The wreck was spotted early in the morning by St George’s fisherman Leonard Astley “Speedy” Dickinson, and the alarm was raised.

A massive search used military and civil aircraft, police and deep-sea fishermen, and local boat owners.

The survivors, speechless from their ordeal, were taken to the hospital while the bodies were brought ashore. The doomed vessel, jutting from the reef, was pounded by waves and severe weather for days.

Survivors quickly made allegations of “drunkenness and incompetence” against the captain, William Ross MacKay.

After an inquiry, Captain Mackay's master’s certificate was cancelled — but he was not found liable for criminal proceedings.

Three men opted to buy and salvage the Ramona: John Chiappa with Stephen Dallas, manager of Standard Hardware, and Rudolph “Silks” Richardson, a charter boat operator.

Recovering the stricken vessel and getting her to Dockyard ultimately took months, but the Ramona, deemed beyond repair, ultimately got sunk off the West End.

The account is far from Mr Rose’s only work on the website.

The ex-policeman has dug into his notebooks and filed to write about “murders, robberies and the drug world” along with “a sad local gambling case which played out in the mid-1970s”.

He added: “I thought back to the Ramona and thought I’d take a break from crime to write a general interest piece about what happened to her.”