A Visit to Isla de Caja de Muertos, Puerto Rico

A Visit to Isla de Caja de Muertos, Puerto Rico

While pastoring the Calvary church in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico (1973-75) I had many great experiences, one of which was a day’s visit by sailboat to “Coffin Island.”  First, let me tell you about the island and then I will tell you about the circumstance that brought about my trip there.

Isla de Caja de Muertos, or Caja de Muertos for short, is an uninhabited island off the southern coast of Puerto Rico.  It is located 8.4 kilometers south of the Puerto Rican mainland and is part of the Playa barrio of Ponce, Puerto Rico, municipality.  The island is protected by the Reserva Natural Caja de Muertos natural reserve, because of its native turtle traffic.  The island is 2.75 kilometers long and up to 860 meters wide.  In other words, it is a small island consisting of only 1.4 square kilometers or just .59 square mile.

The legend is that the island got its name from a Portuguese pirate, Jose Almeida, a former merchant sailor.  Almeida fell in love with a Basque lady in Curacao, married her in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and took her pirating with him around the Caribbean.  On the first raid, however, she was killed by a stray bullet.  Distraught, Almeida had her embalmed and placed in a glass box inside a copper coffin.  He buried her in a cave in a deserted island near Ponce.  He would go every month to gaze over her preserved body and leave half of his treasure in her grave.  Almeida, however, was caught in the Puerto Rican mainland, tried, and executed in El Morro (a fort in old San Juan) in 1832.  Many years later, a Spanish engineer discovered the glass and copper coffin, and identifying the cay on the map gave it its present name, Isla de Caja de Muertos.  (Literally, “the island of the box of death,” or “coffin island.”  The treasure found, if any, was kept secret.

In June of 1974, a young couple, whom I shall refer to as “Bob” and “Betty”, with their three young children began attending our church.  They had a background in another denomination,  but they had seen our advertisement about Vacation Bible School.  Through their children’s involvement in V.B.S. they began attending our church services regularly—that is, Betty and the children did.  Bob came occasionally, but he had a twenty-three foot sailboat in the marina at Ponce on the south side of the island, and he would usually spend his weekends there aboard his boat.

In visiting with the new family and with Winona’s telephone conversations with Betty we learned that Bob and Betty had recently reunited after a year’s separation.  Betty had taken the children and gone to Texas to help with an ailing parent.  While there Bob called her and told her not to return to Puerto Rico because he had found someone else, a young Puerto Rican woman.  After a year Bob had second thoughts and called for Betty to return with the children, for the fling was over.

Their coming to our English-speaking church was part of their attempt to be reconciled after a difficult separation.  Within a few weeks Betty suggested that it might be good if I could become friends with Bob because she felt that he needed to be around Christians instead of only his worldly co-workers.  Furthermore, she strongly suspected that Bob was still seeing his Puerto Rican girlfriend and spending his weekends with her on his boat in Ponce.

I went to see Bob and shared with him my interest in boats and asked him about his sailboat, whereupon he told me that presently he had his boat in dry dock because it needed the bottom refinished.  He accepted my offer to go and help him with the job of refinishing the bottom.  Before long we traveled to Ponce on a Saturday to clean and prepare the bottom of the boat for painting.  I helped scrape barnacles off the bottom and sand it, and the following week he went alone to paint the boat.

A few weeks later when he had his boat back in the water he invited me and one of his co-workers to go sailing and snorkeling at La Isla de Caja de Muertos.  It was a perfect day for sailing and for snorkeling!  We sailed the 8.4 km from Ponce to the island, anchored as close to the shore as the keel would allow us, and swam to shore with our snorkeling gear.  After exploring the lighthouse and a small building beside it we walked over much of the small island before reentering the water for more snorkeling.  The sea was calm which made the snorkeling easy as we examined the colorful coral reef and watched many species of the brilliantly colored tropical fish.

Betty had not asked me to be a spy for her, and I had no intention of cornering Bob about his possible girlfriend.  Going in and out of the boat’s small cuddy cabin that day there was no indication of any woman having been in there.  Hopefully, Betty’s suspicions were wrong, and all in all, it was a wonderful day, one which deserves remembering.

(Note:  Four years later while on vacation we visited Bob, Betty, and their children when they were living back in Ohio.  Our intention was to spend the night with them, but a call from our Orlando church regarding a death caused us to leave immediately after dinner and drive all night to be home for the funeral the next day.)