JAMAICA | OLD STEAMER - THE BEACH THAT A SHIPWRECK MADE

Old Steamer Beach, Hopewell, Hanover: a comprehensive account of its origins, its people, and the century-long struggle to keep it public

HOPEWELL, Hanover,  May 23, 2026 - Calvin G. Brown - There is a beach in Eastern Hanover that does not appear on resort maps, charges no entrance fee, and has no lifeguard, no restaurant and no branding. What it has is a rusted iron boiler rising from the Caribbean Sea, the skeletal ribs of a 19th-century steamship buried at the waterline, and more than 125 years of unbroken community life. The story of how it got its name — and why the people of Hopewell have had to fight for it ever since — is one of the most compelling untold stories on the Jamaican north coast.

I. A Name Earned by Catastrophe

Old Steamer Beach did not get its name from a marketing department. It got it the way the best Caribbean landmarks do — through an accident of nature that time turned into permanent geography.

In or around the Christmas season of 1899, a wood-hulled steam vessel known as the USS Caribou broke its moorings in Montego Bay Harbour and went adrift along Jamaica's north coast. It never returned. Driven westward by the prevailing current and the fierce northerly winds of the Christmas Northers — that annual season when the sea begins to rage along the western parishes and any vessel improperly secured pays for it — the Caribou travelled approximately 15 kilometres from Mo'Bay before running aground at Orchard in the district of Hopewell, Hanover.

The vessel settled into the sand and stayed there. Its wooden hull gradually surrendered to the sea. Planking rotted; structural ribs sank into the shoreline; the boiler — forged iron, built to withstand pressures far exceeding any north coast swell — remained. It remains still: rising a few feet above the waterline at low tide, recognisable to every man, woman and child who has ever swum at this beach, which the community long ago named for the ship it claimed.

The Caribou was built in 1887, a working steam vessel of the type that plied Caribbean trade routes in the late Victorian era. The designation 'USS' has been applied in popular and documentary usage, likely reflecting an American registration at the time of its operations in Jamaican waters. What it was doing moored in Montego Bay in December 1899 — what cargo it carried, who owned it, what company operated it — awaits confirmation from the Gleaner archives of the period or from Lloyd's Register of Shipping for those years. What we know is what the sea did with it.

The Christmas Northers of 1899 were no mild seasonal disruption. That winter produced some of the most powerful cold-front systems of the century across the Caribbean basin. Northerly winds recorded as high as 58 km/h at locations across the region drove water levels dangerously high and wreaked havoc on coastal infrastructure from Cuba to the Leeward Islands. In Montego Bay, open to the north-west, the conditions would have been severe. The Caribou's moorings, whether weakened by age or overwhelmed by the surge, did not hold. The vessel was swallowed by the same sea that had presumably served it for years.

II. The Beach Itself: Character and Community Role

Old Steamer Beach — officially Orchard Beach — is located along the North Coast Highway in the Orchard district of Hopewell, at coordinates 18°27'12.87"N, 78°1'37.13"W, approximately 11 miles west of Montego Bay. It is accessible directly from the main road, lies between Hopewell to the east and Sandy Bay to the west, and sits within easy reach of the communities of Camp, McQuary, Lookout, and Bamboo.

NEPA's beach guide describes it as a public bathing beach of fine white sand, with old reef rocks scattered near the high-water mark and an extensive seagrass bed just beyond the swim zone. A fringing reef approximately 400 metres offshore provides protection to the lagoon and moderates the inshore wave energy that in open conditions would make such a beach dangerous for community bathing. Coastal vegetation includes West Indian almond and seagrape. The area shows signs of erosion — a vulnerability that formal development and environmental management could address.

There are no permanent bathroom facilities, no designated parking, no commercial food stalls, and no lifeguard. By every infrastructure measure it is an underdeveloped public resource of considerable natural quality. And it is, without question, the only free public bathing beach serving the entirety of Eastern Hanover.

That last point carries a weight that is easy to overlook. The north coast of Hanover is home to some of the most prestigious resort properties in the Caribbean: Round Hill Hotel and Villas, the Tryall Club, the Half Moon properties. Their beaches are private, or effectively so. For the families of Hopewell, Sandy Bay, and the surrounding districts — for the fishermen's children, for the elderly residents, for the young people without the means to cross the gates of a resort — Old Steamer Beach is not a leisure option. It is the leisure option. It always has been.

Survey data from the Big Up We Beach Jamaica project records typical weekday attendance of 21 to 50 persons, rising to between 51 and 100 on the busiest days, with Sunday as the community's peak day. Those numbers represent something more than footfall statistics. They represent a continuous social ritual that has been enacted on this shoreline since before any living person in Hopewell can remember — and that has survived, without support, everything that private ownership and institutional indifference could throw at it.

Visitors can hang their towel on the skeleton ship and take a swim at one of the nicest beaches around, which only gets busy on weekends when locals come down in droves. — Moon Jamaica travel guide

Children dive from the boiler. Fishermen read the sea from the exposed hull ribs. The wreck and the community have grown together over 125 years until the one is inseparable from the other. To remove the Caribou's remains would be to remove Old Steamer Beach's identity. To fence the beach would be to fence the community's living room.

III. The Land and Its Owners: A Contested Chain of Title

From the earliest documented disputes to the present day, the story of Old Steamer Beach runs on two tracks simultaneously: the community using the beach, and successive private owners attempting to limit or remove that use. The cast of ownership has changed; the community's response has not.

Shepherd (pre-1957 to late 1950s)

The first recorded ownership conflict dates to 1957, when a Mr. R.D. Shepherd purchased the Orchard property and sought to push fishermen and bathers from the western section — the section that would become Old Steamer Beach — to a point further east. The Hanover Parish Council intervened, insisting that conditions protecting the public's interests had to be met before any relocation could proceed. Negotiations dragged without conclusion. Shepherd sold before any settlement was formalised.

Silberstein (late 1950s to c. 1991)

The Orchard property passed to Mr. Ben L. Silberstein, and the approach hardened. In January 1968, Silberstein's legal representative — the Honourable Walter Fletcher C.B.E., of Fletcher & Co. Ltd., Montego Bay, agents for the Cunard Steamship Line and the Jamaica Fruit & Shipping Co. Ltd. — wrote to the Beach Control Authority demanding that it fence off the portion of beach it had been allocated and prosecute any trespassers outside that area. Fletcher’s letter was blunt:

Mr. Silberstein insisted that I wrote you and advised you that you must promptly, very promptly, at any rate fence off the portion of beach which was to be conceded to you … and put up the necessary painted notices so that anyone trespassing on the beach outside of this area action could be taken against them … we could stop the annoyance of the people continually trespassing on the seafront of the property. — Walter Fletcher C.B.E., 17 January 1968

The irony is worth pausing on. The agents of the Cunard Steamship Line — one of the great maritime empires of the age — were the legal instrument used to exclude the public from a beach named after a steamship. The maritime world that created Old Steamer Beach's identity was simultaneously the vehicle used to challenge the public's right to it.

The Beach Control Authority's response made clear it could not act without the formal documentation of the original Shepherd agreement being completed. The stalemate continued.

Maffessanti (1991 to 2023)

By 1991 the property was in the hands of Mr. Giuseppe Maffessanti. The Beach Control Authority wrote to him seeking to reconcile community interests with his development plans. The Maffessanti family's ownership — subsequently passing to Guisette and Daniella Maffessanti — would persist for more than thirty years, during which every attempt to formalise development of the beach was complicated by the question of exactly which parcels of the subdivided Orchard Estate constituted the beachfront.

In February 2023, following negotiations brokered through the Hanover Municipal Corporation, the Maffessanti family donated the title to the beach sections — covering both Old Steamer Beach and the adjacent Fishermen Beach — to the HMC. It was the moment the community had been waiting for since 1957. It should have been the beginning of the end of the ownership problem. What happened next will be addressed shortly.

At present, the newly elected member of parliament Andrea Purkiss is in dialog with the TEF to expedite the programme of development for the Old Steamer beach, as this has been in the pipeline for quite some time. 

Newly elected Member of Parliament has been speaking to the Tourism Minister urging him to expedite the promised development for the Old Steamer Beach.

IV. The Law: Rights That Were Never Extinguished

The most important single document in the history of Old Steamer Beach is not a land title, a development brochure, or a newspaper editorial. It is a four-paragraph legal opinion signed by W.W. Coke, Director of State Proceedings in the Attorney General's Chambers, dated 5th October 1993. That opinion, addressed to the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government, Youth & Sports, established in plain terms what the community had always known: the public's right to Orchard Beach is protected by Jamaican law.

Coke's analysis rested on two legal instruments. The first was the Beach Control Act, Section 3(1), which vests all rights over Jamaica's foreshore — the tidal zone between high and low water marks — in the Crown. No private owner can own the foreshore. What Old Steamer Beach's community swims in has never, legally, been anyone's private property.

The second was the preservation clause, Section 3(3), which explicitly protects any rights held by fishermen engaged in fishing as a trade where those rights existed before 1st June 1956. The Hopewell fishing community had been operating from the Orchard Fishing Beach well before that date. Their right to continue doing so was not a matter of custom alone. It was a matter of statute.

For the general bathing public, Section 14 of the Beach Control Act provided a parallel protection: where the public has used a beach without interruption for twenty years, the Natural Resources Conservation Authority may apply to the Supreme Court for a formal declaration of prescriptive rights. Coke's conclusion was straightforward:

In my view, therefore, if it can be established that the fishermen had used the beach prior to 1st June 1956, their rights to continue to do so are preserved by the above-quoted Sections of the Beach Control Act. — W.W. Coke, Director of State Proceedings, 5 October 1993

The evidence for pre-1956 use was overwhelming and uncontested: the Parish Council's 1991 resolution had stated 'upwards of fifty years' of community use, placing documented use back to the early 1940s at the latest. The 1968 Fletcher letter itself referred to residents 'continuously trespassing' — language that, from the community's point of view, described the exercise of rights that predated any of the private owners' claims.

One question the archival record raises but does not answer is what became of the formal court proceedings under the Prescription Act. An affidavit by Lloyd Jarrett, made before a Justice of the Peace for the Parish of Hanover in 1995, was filed as part of legal action to establish prescriptive rights. Whether a Supreme Court order was ever obtained remains unconfirmed. It is the central unanswered legal question in this story, and one that the HMC's current legal team would be well advised to pursue.

V. The People's Campaign: Seven Decades of Advocacy

Strip away the legal architecture, the ownership disputes, and the institutional correspondence, and what you find at the centre of the Old Steamer Beach story is a community that has never stopped fighting for what it was always entitled to.

The Hopewell Citizens Association and the Fishermen of Hopewell have been the grassroots engine of that campaign throughout. Their pressure on the Parish Council in 1991 — described in the official correspondence as 'again pressing for a resolution,' language that implies earlier, undocumented rounds of advocacy — produced the formal resolution that sent the community's demands to the Prime Minister's desk. When that was ignored, they sent it again. When a new Prime Minister was elected, they sent it a third time.

The Hanover Parish Council has been the institutional vehicle for that advocacy, and its record across nearly seven decades deserves acknowledgement. From its resistance to the Shepherd relocation demand in 1957, through the formal resolutions of 1991 addressed to Prime Ministers Manley and Patterson, to its role in brokering the 2023 Maffessanti title transfer, the Council has consistently placed the community's interest ahead of the private owner's preferences. That consistency, over multiple decades and changes of political administration, is not something to take for granted.

There have been two distinct but related claims at the heart of the advocacy. The first is for Old Steamer Beach itself: the public bathing beach, the community's recreation, the irreplaceable social space on which Eastern Hanover's non-resort population depends. The second is for the Orchard Fishing Beach: the working waterfront from which the fishing community has operated for more than a century, whose occupational rights are preserved by statute, and whose integration into any development plan has been explicitly demanded in every significant advocacy document on record.

The community has always insisted on both. It has never accepted a settlement that addressed the bathing beach while leaving the fishing beach unresolved, or vice versa. That dual claim is not stubbornness. It is a coherent understanding of the social geography of this coastline and the interconnected livelihoods that depend upon it.

VI. The Blueprints That Were Never Built

No serious account of Old Steamer Beach can avoid the question of why, given that the community's legal rights have been established, the advocacy has been continuous, and the need has never been in doubt, the beach remains undeveloped after more than two decades of formal planning.

The 2000 Orchard Beach Development Plan

In 2000, the Hanover Parish Council in conjunction with residents of Hopewell produced a formal development brochure for Orchard Beach. It was not a wish list. It was a business plan, complete with a project description, a stakeholder benefit analysis, a three-phase capital cost structure totalling $21.1 million, a five-year projected income and expenditure schedule, a proposed corporate management structure, and a list of institutional partners including NEPA, the Tourism Product Development Company (TPDCo), the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, and the Ministry of Local Government, Community Development and Sport.

The project description was specific: renovation of the existing restaurant into a rustic dining facility, comprehensive beach and environment landscaping, construction of craft and retail stalls, incorporation of the fishing village into the overall development, and the installation of gazebos and walking trails. Crucially, the fishing village was not an afterthought. It was written into the plan from the start.

The financial analysis projected a positive Net Present Value. The five-year income projections moved from $3.8M in Year 1 to $7.1M in Year 5, against expenditure rising from $3.0M to $4.0M, generating net income that grew from $0.8M to $3.1M over the period. This was not a request for a government subsidy. It was a commercially viable investment proposal.

The momentum behind the plan was real. The construction of the Aston King Highway had provided the beach with additional adjacent land space. The MLGCD&S was involved from 2001. Two named contact persons — Mr. Alfred Graham at the Hanover Parish Council and Mrs. Lorna Perkins at the Ministry — stood ready to receive expressions of interest. Architectural drawings followed in 2002.

Nothing was built.

The TEF Era: 2022 to the Present

When the Tourism Enhancement Fund listed Old Steamer Beach among the public beaches under its Beaches Development Programme, the community's response was not celebration. It was measured scepticism born of lived experience. TEF project manager Nalford Hyde and consultants from Pragmatic Analysis Company Limited visited the site in November 2022 for an assessment. Devon Brown, Councillor for the Hopewell Division, was among those who questioned the purpose of the visit.

'This whole visit is a trick,' was how some community members characterised the site assessment, and the remark made the Gleaner's headline. It was not cynicism for its own sake. It was the earned response of a community that had watched plans, consultations, architectural drawings, and ministerial visits come and go since 2000, leaving the beach exactly as it was.

The TEF's town hall on November 27, 2022 at the Hopewell Community Centre proceeded. A multimillion-dollar development plan was exhibited. Then, in December 2022, the community was left furious when a clean-up operation carried out immediately after the TEF visit left mounds of tree trimmings and uncollected garbage beside the beach's new wooden bench — with the TEF and the World Bank trading blame over who had authorised the exercise and who was responsible for the mess.

The ownership question then surfaced fully. In January 2023 the Gleaner confirmed that uncertainty over the Orchard property title was threatening to derail the development before it began. By February 2023 the HMC announced it had received the title from the Maffessanti family. Court proceedings to secure beach sections for recreational use were referenced. By May 2023, the survey boundary pegs had been removed by unknown persons. Mayor Samuels called it malicious destruction of property and directed the HMC's legal team to respond.

Since we did the survey, and the surveyor put in the pegs, I cannot say who, but someone has dug out the pegs. — Xavier Munroe, Deputy Superintendent of Roads and Works, HMC, May 2023

As of October 2023, the TEF executive director confirmed Old Steamer Beach and Watson Taylor Beach in Lucea were 'being attended to' and would form part of the development plan for fiscal year 2024-2025. No further public update on construction commencement has been confirmed at the time of writing.

VII. What Remains to Be Done

The title is in public hands. The law is on the community's side. The business case has been made, twice, with detailed financial modelling. The advocacy has been sustained across seven decades, through multiple changes of private ownership, through multiple governments, through the indifference of every institution that ought long since to have acted. The beach remains exactly as it was when the Caribou ran aground.

What the community of Hopewell has asked for, consistently and without variation since the first recorded dispute in 1957, reduces to four things:

First, the formal, legally secured transfer to permanent public ownership of both Old Steamer Beach and the Orchard Fishing Beach, so that no future change of council leadership, ministerial priority, or private interest can reopen the question.

Second, the preservation of the fishermen's right to operate from the Orchard Fishing Beach without encroachment, consistent with the Beach Control Act and the Attorney General's 1993 opinion, and with their integration into, not displacement by, any development that occurs.

Third, the development of Old Steamer Beach with infrastructure proportionate to its importance: sanitation, parking, commercial amenities, and environmental management — while retaining its character as a free, community-centred public space not subject to resort-style privatisation.

Fourth, that any development be designed and implemented in genuine partnership with the Hopewell community and its organised institutions, not delivered to them from outside as a fait accompli.

None of these demands is unreasonable. None requires a reinvention of policy or a departure from what the law already says. They require only implementation — the conversion of what is already on paper, already confirmed in statute, already in the title registry, into the physical reality of a developed, accessible, community-owned beach.

The rusted boiler of the USS Caribou has stood in the surf at Orchard for 125 years. It is, by now, as much a part of this coastline as the seagrape trees and the reef. The community that has grown up around it — that has swum beside it, worked in its shadow, and fought for the right to continue doing so across generations — has waited long enough.

At a Glance: Key Facts

The Vessel  USS Caribou, wood-hulled steamer, built 1887; broke moorings Montego Bay c. December 1899 during Christmas Northers; ran aground at Orchard, Hopewell, Hanover

Location  Orchard District, Hopewell, Hanover  •  18°27’12.87"N, 78°1’37.13"W  •  ~11 miles west of Montego Bay

Legal Status  Title held by Hanover Municipal Corporation (from February 2023); foreshore vested in Crown under Beach Control Act; public rights preserved by prescription

Significance  Only free public bathing beach in Eastern Hanover

Key Legal Opinion  W.W. Coke, Director of State Proceedings, Attorney General’s Chambers, 5 October 1993

Development Plan (2000)  $21.1M total capital cost across 3 phases; projected net income Year 5: $3.1M; positive Net Present Value

Ownership Chain  Shepherd (pre-1957) → Silberstein (c.1957–1991) → Giuseppe Maffessanti (1991) → Guisette & Daniella Maffessanti → Hanover Municipal Corporation (2023)

Current Status  Title transferred; development deferred to TEF fiscal year 2024-2025; survey pegs sabotaged (May 2023); HMC legal team engaged

Calvin G. Brown is a journalist, political communications consultant and Justice of the Peace for the Parish of Hanover.

He is publisher of WiredJa, a Caribbean-focused digital publication covering regional politics and current affairs.

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