The figures, source by source

Compiled 26 July 2026, last revised 14 August 2026, and checked against every document in the corpus. Purpose: to record what each figure was, who stated it, when, and on what stated basis, so the record remains usable as figures are revised. Nothing here is settled; everything is attributed.

New on 30 July: a submitted expert analysis of the statute book. A 253-page analysis of the Guyanese maritime statutes was submitted to this archive by its author, Robert C. Millington — retired United States Navy naval officer; former licensed United States Coast Guard Merchant Marine Deck Officer, Unlimited Tonnage; former First Class Ship Pilot, Unlimited Tonnage; BSc Marine Transportation, State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler; thirty-nine years in the military, maritime and logistics sectors. He states that he is not admitted to practise law in Guyana or in any other jurisdiction and that nothing in the document is legal advice. It is held and published in full.

Three things about how it is used on this page. It is an analysis, not a record — it makes no finding of fact, and its author has no access to the wreck, the certificates, the stability book, the manifest or any witness. Everything drawn from it is attributed to him by name and marked Single source where it rests on him alone, which is most of it. And his own stated limitation applies throughout: the consolidation he read is current only to L.R.O. 1/2012, so every finding expressed as the absence of a regulation is subject to checking against post-2012 instruments and the Official Gazette.

A deadline that may already be running, for anyone with a possible claim

This section is placed before the figures because it is time-critical, and for no other reason. What follows is one qualified person's reading of a statutory provision. This archive is not qualified to confirm that reading, and nothing here is legal advice. It is recorded because if the reading is right, a period is running now, and a family that waits for the Commission of Inquiry to report may find it gone.

Single source Millington reads section 23 of the Transport and Harbours Act, Cap. 49:04, as requiring two things of anyone bringing an action against the Transport and Harbours Department: that no such action be commenced until one month after written notice naming the claimant's legal practitioner has been served on the Department, and that every such action be commenced within six months after the act or omission complained of, "and not otherwise."

On that reading, six months from 18 July 2026 expires on or about 18 January 2027, and the written notice would have to be served by about 18 December 2026. He records it as the most urgent item in his document.

Six reasons he gives for why such a period would fall hardest on the people least able to meet it. It runs from the act or omission, not from knowledge of it, not from death, not from the identification of a body and not from a grant of representation. The Commission of Inquiry will very probably not have reported within six months, so a family that waits for it may find the period gone. The claimants are disproportionately residents of Region One, which has no road to Georgetown, and the vessel that connected them to Georgetown is on the seabed. The notice must name a legal practitioner, so a family has to find and instruct one before the clock can be stopped. As at 27 July 2026 five recovered victims remained unidentified and at least thirty people were unaccounted for, and a family with no body and no death certificate cannot readily obtain a grant of representation, while the section makes no allowance for that. And ex gratia assistance is not compensation and does not stop the clock — which bears directly on section 9 of this page, where the payments made so far are recorded as funeral-expense assistance that the Prime Minister has expressly said is "not deemed compensation."

And on his analysis there is no insurer to claim against. He states that Cap. 49:01 s. 398(2) requires the Minister to have due regard to the Athens Convention when making passenger-ship regulations, that no such regulations were made, and so "the requirement of due regard never attached to anything"; and that Guyana enacted the limitation of liability in Part XVI without enacting the liability — "the protective half of the international bargain was omitted and the limiting half retained." He records no strict liability for a shipping incident, no presumed fault, no compulsory insurance and no direct right of action against an insurer. Set against that, from within this corpus: Minister Edghill confirmed on 22 July that the state had assumed the risk on an uninsured vessel, which points the same way from a different direction.

What this archive is saying, and what it is not. It is saying that a named, qualified person has read a section of a Guyanese statute and concluded that a six-month period is running from 18 July 2026, with notice due a month before it ends. It is not saying that this is the law, that the section applies to any particular claim, that no other limitation provision or extension exists, or that the reading survives argument — all of which are matters for a Guyanese lawyer and, if it comes to it, a Guyanese court. Anyone who may have a claim arising from the loss of the MV Barima should take Guyanese legal advice now, rather than wait for the Commission of Inquiry. That is the author's own recommendation. This archive repeats it without endorsing his construction of the section, and gives no legal advice of its own.

1. How many people were aboard

Other figures in this record depend on this one.

Certified capacity. Three inconsistent versions appear in the corpus, all attributed to officials. No published certificate appears in the corpus:

Cargo actually carried: 268 tonnes manifested, with Edghill's own line-by-line audit returning 260 tonnes "early in the day" on 19 July. (Most of the corpus renders both figures in tonnes; a minority of reports say tons. This archive uses the dominant rendering and notes the discrepancy rather than silently converting.)

Thomas cannot say when or on what basis the passenger rating rose from 150 to 394 — "I don't have that information."

Why no safety code fixed her capacity: the 24-metre gap. Single source Millington's central finding is a length band. The Barima's length is given in his document as 40.26 m. Because she was longer than 24 metres, the Guyana Shipping (Small Commercial Ship Safety) Regulations, Reg. 5 of 2005, did not apply to her — and he describes that instrument as "the only place in the entire 904-page consolidation containing intact stability criteria, stability information for operating personnel, an ISM-referenced safety management system, a Record of Passengers, a marine casualty notification duty, and station bill, muster and drill requirements." Because she was a passenger ship, the Guyana Shipping (Cargo Ship Survey) Regulations, Reg. 6 of 2005, excluded her by its own words: regulation 3 applies to sea-going Guyana ships under 500 gross tonnage but above 24 metres in length "except passenger ships, fishing vessels and pleasure craft." In his words she "fell squarely inside the band and was removed from it by five words."

⚠️ And on 4 August this reading came under strain from its own author. His second submission places the vessel inside Part X of Cap. 49:01, quoting s. 297's six exceptions and concluding that "a mechanically propelled steel passenger ferry in commercial service falls within Part X" — which carries s. 257 (survey before service and periodically at intervals of not more than twelve months), s. 258 (the initial survey must ensure life-saving appliances comply with the Safety Convention) and ss. 261–263 (the Passenger Ship Safety Certificate). The second document does not mention 24 metres, the Small Commercial Ship Safety Regulations or the "except passenger ships" carve-out anywhere. He does not say he has changed his mind and does not refer to the earlier document. This archive holds neither instrument, records both readings, and prefers neither — but a reader should know that the same qualified person has, within five days, described this vessel as falling outside every safety instrument and as falling inside the principal one.

What that means for the two things this section records. On capacity: he states that Part XV of Cap. 49:01, headed "Passenger Ships", consists of two sections — an enabling power to make regulations that do not appear in the authorised consolidation, and offences of drunkenness and fare evasion — and that the only rule in Guyanese law for ascertaining the passenger capacity of a power-driven coasting vessel is reg. 13(3) of the Coasting and Passenger Trade Regulations, which sets the number "as ascertained in accordance with the survey established from time to time by the Board of Trade of the United Kingdom." That is a body that has not existed under that name for decades. On survey: had she carried freight instead of people, he states, she would have been subject to a five-yearly structural and machinery survey and to annual surveys; "because she carried people, she was subject to neither instrument." His summary: "A vessel one metre shorter, carrying a small fraction of her complement, was subject to a materially more demanding safety code than she was."

This is offered as an explanation of why three officials could give four different capacity figures and none could be traced to a document. It is not proof that no such document exists, and it is subject to the L.R.O. 1/2012 limitation stated at the head of this page.

The submission's own reading of these capacity figures. Millington records the certificated capacity as given variously at approximately 397, approximately 394 and approximately 150 passengers by three named sources — reached independently of this page, and the same three-way conflict tabulated above. On the manifest figure of 133 he makes an arithmetical point this page had not: "the arithmetic does not close at all: 76 rescued plus 73 recovered dead exceeds 133 by sixteen." That is a check on the manifest rather than on the capacity: 149 people are accounted for as rescued or recovered from a voyage the manifest records as carrying 133. It is consistent with, and independent of, the CCTV-derived figure of 179 above.

What the sources record. Only 35 of the first 67 survivors appeared on the manifest, per Edghill on 19 July — so thirty-two people recorded as rescued were not recorded as having boarded. DPI releases of 19 July state that families were being updated using the vessel's manifest. The figure of 179 is attributed to a review of CCTV footage rather than to any paper record. A Demerara Waves column of 22 July noted that rescued plus recovered plus missing already exceeded 170 while the official complement stood at 133.

Contested The Jamaica Gleaner, 20 July, inverts the manifest finding — reporting that at least 35 of the 67 rescued were not on the manifest. Every Guyanese source has it the other way. Treat the Gleaner rendering as an error, but note it, because the inverted version circulated internationally.

AP supplies the mechanism the official account omits: ticket clerks had sold unmanifested seats for cash "for decades at state-run ferry terminals." This is not a one-night lapse but a standing informal practice.

No counting duty of the kind that would have mattered exists in Guyanese law. Single source Millington's reading of the statute book is that the difference between 133 and 179 is not a breach of any counting obligation, because Guyana never created one. SOLAS Chapter III regulation 27 requires all persons on board a passenger ship to be counted before departure and the record kept ashore. Cap. 49:01 s. 398(1)(b) confers a power to require particulars as to all passengers, and he records no regulations made under it. In his words: "The discrepancy between 133 and 179 is therefore not, on the face of the statute book, a breach of any counting duty — because no counting duty exists." He describes a manifest as a commercial document compiled from bookings for revenue purposes, not a safety document.

That last point is worth holding against the table above, because the table already shows it without having drawn the conclusion: the 116 passengers were "accounted for" through 100 online bookings and 16 Mobile Money transactions. Those are sales records. The archive has been recording a booking total and a headcount as though they were two attempts at the same measurement.

A SECOND SUBMISSION, AND A CORRECTION THIS ARCHIVE MADE AND THEN HAD TO UNMAKE WITHIN THE HOUR. Millington's second submission of 3 August sets out section 7(1) of the Passengers Act, Cap. 49:03: the master must "declare the number, names, sex and age of every person on board, in writing in a form appointed by the Director, signed and affirmed before the principal officer of customs, and delivered before clearance", with one year's imprisonment for a false declaration; and section 8(1), under which no passenger ship may clear until the master holds a certificate that the number aboard does not exceed the statutory limit.

On first reading this archive took that as a contradiction of his earlier finding and withdrew it. That was wrong, and the withdrawal is itself withdrawn. The same document, read whole, reconciles the two: Deficiency 18, marked Critical, repeats the earlier premise unchanged — "The power to require particulars of all passengers has existed since 1998 and has never been exercised" (Cap. 49:01 s. 398(1)(b)) — and his reform section still proposes creating what does not exist: "a duty of passenger accounting: a named officer responsible for the tally at embarkation, a physical count reconciled against tickets before the brow is landed, and a signed and timed manifest lodged ashore before departure and preserved." A man does not recommend creating a duty he has just said already exists.

So the two provisions are about different things, and the distinction is the whole point. Cap. 49:03 s. 7(1) is a customs pre-clearance declaration — a paper delivered to an officer before sailing. What SOLAS Chapter III regulation 27 requires, and what Cap. 49:01 s. 398(1)(b) empowers and nobody ever enacted, is a headcount reconciled and kept ashore. The Barima's manifest was a booking record; the 179 came from CCTV reviewed after she sank. Neither is the thing s. 7(1) describes, and on his own account the form appointed by the Director under s. 7(1) has not been identified — his Deficiency 19, also Critical — so even the declaration may exist without the instrument that gives it effect. And where the ship belongs to the State, the sanction under s. 8(2) is forfeiture to the State, which he calls nugatory, with nothing substituted.

What this archive got wrong, and why it is recording it here. It read one provision in a fifty-two-page document, inferred a contradiction, and withdrew a published finding without reading the two passages that reconciled it. That is the same failure this site has logged repeatedly in the other direction — asserting an absence without completing the search — and it is worth naming as its mirror image: an over-correction is a correction that did not finish its own homework. The finding stands, narrowed and better supported than before.

So this page corrects its own framing. Nothing on it should be read as recording a failure to comply with a requirement to count passengers, and the "Booking systems, not headcount" note in the table above is a description of what the figure is, not of a standard it fell short of. What the 133/179 gap does record is that the state's own two counts of one voyage do not agree, that the earlier of the two was a record of sales, and that the later came from CCTV reviewed after the vessel was lost. Whether anyone was under a legal duty to count is a question of Guyanese law this archive cannot answer. The only analysis of it in the corpus says there was none — subject to the L.R.O. 1/2012 limitation stated at the head of this page, which matters here specifically, because a regulation made after 2012 under s. 398(1)(b) would change the answer.

2. Survivor figures and their revision

8 → 53 → 67 → 69 → 77 → 76, where it froze.

Two outlets reported a reason for the reduction. News Room attributed it to de-duplication across uncoordinated reporting channels; Kaieteur described the same verification and reconciliation process taking 77 down to 76. Demerara Waves reported that ten people recorded as found overnight Monday were already at home.

Resolved, 29 July. This page carried the 76/77 difference as an open discrepancy from the day it was compiled. It is now resolved. Kaieteur of 29 July, reporting PM Phillips, gives 77 persons initially rescued and 76 survivors — one of the 77 died after rescue. On that account both figures are correct and describe different things: 77 people were taken from the water, 76 lived. The archive records 77 rescued and 76 survived, and no longer treats the pair as a conflict. The earlier de-duplication and verification explanations are left standing above, because they are a different account of the same one-person difference and no source reconciles them against Phillips's.

3. The dead — two parallel sequences

Official (bodies recovered), attributed almost entirely to PM Phillips rather than police or coroner: 2 (20 Jul, Edghill) → 10 → 27 (20 Jul, 18:30) → 41 (21 Jul, 14:00) → 53 (21 Jul) → 65 (22 Jul) → 72 (23 Jul) → 73 (24 Jul), unchanged through 29 July. Of the 73: 68 identified and 5 unidentified.

Revised 29 July. This page previously gave 69 identified, 63 released to families. That was the 24 July figure. Kaieteur and iNews on 28–29 July give five bodies still unidentified, and WIC News on 29 July states 68 identified, which is the same arithmetic against 73 recovered. The earlier figure is recorded here rather than silently overwritten: no source in the corpus explains the movement from 69 to 68, and the count of bodies released to families has not been restated since 24 July.

Unofficial and inferential: - 103 — Kaieteur News, 22 July. Not a government figure and not a claim by the Opposition Leader: it is Kaieteur's own tally compiled from three days of search work by the Coast Guard, Azruddin Mohamed, private vessel owners and local fishermen. Mohamed himself said only that "it looks like over 100." The state reported 53 the same day — a fifty-body gap. - ~100 — AP, 22 July, arithmetic: 179 minus 76 survivors. Echoed by Al Jazeera on 23 July while that outlet still carried 53 recovered, so an inference and a body count coexisted in international copy for about forty-eight hours. - "over one hundred" — WIN MP Sweatnam. - "unofficially more than 100" — Demerara Waves.

Missing: 83 (20–21 Jul, Phillips, and cited by Bulkan) → 30 unaccounted for (24 Jul, Phillips). Guyana Times on 24 July says "at least 31." Nobody reconciles 83 against 30.

Figures not published. 179 aboard, less 76–77 survivors, leaves 102–103 dead. Seventy-three bodies have been recovered. The state reports recoveries and never the residual, so the roughly thirty people still in or near the wreck have never appeared in an official total. Al Jazeera's 21 July piece is a live-updated artefact that preserves two tolls at once — the slug says 41, the headline says 53.

4. The charges — three accused, 72 counts

Three men were charged on 28 July 2026 with murder contrary to common law, on the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The charges were read before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman at the Georgetown Magistrates' Court. No pleas were taken, all three were remanded to prison, and the matter was adjourned to the Charity Magistrate's Court on 3 August 2026. On 3 August the three appeared by Zoom before Magistrate Ravindra Mohabir. The prosecutor, Mandel Moore, confirmed he holds a fiat, made partial disclosure and sought until 31 August to complete it. The matter was adjourned to 7 September 2026. Single source for the hearing detail — the Grenada Chronicle; the adjournment date is separately carried by CMC wire via the Jamaica Observer. No plea has been taken and all three remain untried.

All three are accused persons who have not been tried. This archive takes no view on their guilt or innocence. It records the names as published, the count as reported, the procedure, and the discrepancies — nothing further.

Contested Roberts's address is published two ways. Kaieteur of 28 July, News Room and HGPTV give "Meadow Grove Public Road"; Demerara Waves and Kaieteur of 29 July give "Grove Public Road". His forename appears as both Rondell and Rondel. Both renderings of the address are recorded; the archive does not choose between them.

The count: 72, laid jointly. Five outlets state the total independently — Times Caribbean on 28 July, the earliest surveyed, then CMC in the Jamaica Observer, Caribbean National Weekly, WIC News and HGPTV, all on 29 July. The 72 counts are laid jointly against the three men together, not 72 each. No source states how they are distributed among the accused.

No official release states any count. The police release, as reproduced by the Guyanese outlets that carried it, records that the men were charged following legal advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions and gives no number; the DPP's own statement of 28 July gives no number either. The figure of 72 entered the record through court reporting and defence comment, not through any official document.

Its derivation reached the public first through defence counsel. Dexter Todd, via Caribbean National Weekly: "We know so far that the disclosure is that 72 bodies were recovered and so they were charged for all 72 of those deaths." That is counsel's account of the prosecution's disclosure, not a prosecution statement. The particulars were published on 30 July, by Kaieteur News, and they corroborate the shape of Todd's account without confirming his reason for it: the indictable charge alleges that on 18 July 2026, at a point 9.3 nautical miles on a bearing of 040° off the Essequibo Coast at Devonshire Castle, the three men murdered 72 named victims. So the counts correspond to 72 named people. Why the charge names 72 when 73 bodies had been recovered is still explained nowhere but in Todd's account, and no official release states any count at all.

Unresolved Every official figure from 24 to 29 July gave 73 bodies recovered. The charge names 72 victims. Both figures stand in the record and nothing in the corpus reconciles them.

And on 30 July the official figure itself moved to 72, without announcement. DPI's own release of that day, and Demerara Waves, state "72 bodies were recovered, 30 could not be accounted for, and 76 were rescued." On the same day News Room, Kaieteur News in three separate reports, Kiskadee Watch and iNews Guyana all still give 73. No source announces a revision and none explains one. This page keeps 73 as the figure of record, for a stated reason: 73 + 30 + 76 makes the 179 the state says were aboard, and 72 + 30 + 76 makes 178 — yet every source giving 72 also gives 30 unaccounted for. The sum stopped reconciling. The 72 is recorded as an unexplained divergence rather than as a correction, and the possibility that it is contamination from the charge sheet is this archive's inference, not the record's.

And on 1 August the divergence got worse for the state, from its own files. A Department of Public Information release of 28 July, which this archive did not hold until now, gives 73 recovered, 68 identified and released, five awaiting identification, 30 unaccounted for, 76 survivors of 77 rescued. So the 73 that DPI abandoned without announcement on 30 July was DPI's own published figure two days earlier. Nothing in either release acknowledges the other. Guyana Times, the outlet closest to the administration, was still giving 73 on 1 August.

And on 31 July the archive took in a wider missing range than it carries anywhere else. Single source On a 30 July broadcast, Janette Bulkan framed the toll as 76 survivors and 73 bodies retrieved, and said of those unaccounted for: "probably between 30 and 50. We still do not know how many persons are unaccounted for." Almost every other source gives about 30, and 30 is what makes 73 + 30 + 76 reconcile to 179 — but not every one: News Americas, on 19 July, gave 49 unaccounted for, at a stage when 67 had been rescued and the complement was still being counted, and that document is cited on this site at finding 15. So a figure near the top of Bulkan's range has appeared here before, from the first day, before the CCTV count existed. A figure of 50 would not reconcile against 179 at all: 73 + 50 + 76 is 199. So the upper end of her range is only available if the number aboard was higher than the state's own CCTV count, and no source published since that count says so. Bulkan does not draw the inference and this archive does not attribute it to her; what she says is that the number is not known, and she gives a range. It is recorded here as a divergence and not adopted. The figure of record on this page remains 30. What the divergence marks is that a well-informed critic of the state's account does not regard the residual as settled — which is a different thing from a rival number.

A proposed explanation for one of the early jumps, from the same broadcast. Single source David Patterson attributes an early jump in the survivor count to counting having been split between two bodies: survivors picked up by one were not counted by the other, so the published number moved. He offers it as an illustration of what a single coordinating centre would have prevented rather than as a reconstruction of any particular figure, and he names no date and no numbers. It is recorded because it is the only explanation for any of the count movements on this page that anyone has offered at all. It is uncorroborated, and it does not touch the 133/179 gap, which is a difference between a manifest and a CCTV review rather than between two rescuing agencies.

The DPP's stated basis for the charges. Shalimar Hack, 28 July, verbatim: "The decision to do so was based upon careful consideration of the evidence presented, the relevant principles of law involved, case law authorities from the United Kingdom, Commonwealth jurisdictions, the European Court of Human Rights, and public policy considerations."

What the statement did not address. Demerara Waves (Chabrol) records that she spoke "without directly addressing the legal elements — intent and malice — of murder." HGPTV corroborates the omission from the other side: the statement "did not disclose the evidence contained in the police file or explain publicly how prosecutors intend to establish the legal elements required for murder." How murder is to be made out on these facts is therefore not in the corpus.

Single source Demerara Waves' lead characterises the DPP as having "publicly stated that the vessel's navigational and safety systems were defective." This is the reporting outlet's wording, not a quotation of the DPP. The article carries no direct quotation of her describing the systems; iNews reproduces the same release at near-full length with no such statement; HGPTV omits it. It must not be cited as a DPP admission about the vessel. An earlier version of this archive treated it as one. That was wrong.

5. Was she seaworthy?

The state's position, stated precisely. DPI's headline of 20 July is "MV Barima was seaworthy – Min Edghill," but Edghill's own words are narrower: "There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy." That is an absence-of-reports claim, not a survey finding, and the distinction should be preserved in any citation. On the machinery he was more categorical — "There was no engine problem or any mechanical problem" (19–20 July), and "there was no reported engine troubles from the crew when the boat came in and when the boat left" (22 July). MARAD's Thomas, 22 July: "not overloaded," citing the load line, and stating that age is not determinative because modern thin steel is stronger.

And from 12 August, what sits against it is documentary rather than circumstantial. Five outlets — Kaieteur News, News Source Guyana, Village Voice News and Kiskadee Watch on 12 August, HGPTV on 13 August — report internal defect records for this vessel, passed within the Transport & Harbours Department. Kaieteur News, HGPTV and Kiskadee Watch each say they obtained the records. News Source Guyana says only that the documents were "seen by News Source" and does not say how it came by them; Village Voice News reports the same material without stating provenance. Five accounts, three stated acquisitions, no shared byline — a great deal stronger than one outlet, and still not verification. Their date ranges differ (Kaieteur: August 2025 to March 2026 in its first report and January 2024 to January 2026 in its second; News Source: 17 November 2025 to 9 March 2026; the others: November 2025 to March 2026) and so do their details, which is consistent with five newsrooms holding overlapping parts of the same file. Common to all five accounts: a generator out of service — dated 30 November 2025 by News Source, HGPTV and Kiskadee, and attributed by three of the five to a failed water pump, where Kaieteur puts the water-pump damage at 31 August 2025 and its 30 November entry reads only "generator #1 completely out of service"; a heat exchanger running hot — located on the port main engine by four of the five, unlocated in News Source; and a main engine exhaust leaking into the engine room. The 197–203°F figure is given by four of the five, where News Source has only "working at a high temperature". The electrical changeover panel burnt out at Port Kaituma on 28 November appears in HGPTV, News Source, Village Voice and Kiskadee and not in Kaieteur's account. Kaieteur alone reports a VHF communication system recorded on 22 December as completely inoperable, a damaged life raft cradle, and fuel lines described on 21 January 2026 as "heavily corroded" and able to "break at anytime while the vessel is in operation"; it alone names a compiler, Shore Chief Engineer Corwin Stephen, where News Source attributes the reports to the Marine Division's chief engineer, and Kaieteur's first report says they were signed by Captain K. Price and Chief Engineer P. Seepersaud and endorsed by the shore chief engineer and marine superintendent. Kaieteur alone reports the column for completed work as blank throughout. One report, in News Source's account, reads: "Please treat this development urgently."

How this page treats that. It does not change the state's position, because no government statement on the records has been published — a search on 14 August across the Guyanese outlets in this corpus, DPI and the Office of the President found none, forty-eight hours on. That search had one hole in it and it is the wrong one: the state-owned Guyana Chronicle could not be fetched at all, so the absence is a limit of retrieval rather than a fact about the government. It changes what the state's position now has to survive. Edghill's claim was an absence-of-reports claim, and an absence-of-reports claim is precisely the kind a leaked report can break. Three limits hold, and they are not small: this archive holds none of the originals and cannot check a date, a signature or a word of the quoted text; a defect report is not a survey, and a list of things that broke on a working ship is the maintenance system functioning rather than failing; and a blank column is not proof that no repair was made, only that none was recorded on the form the newspapers describe. Nothing here establishes a cause of the sinking. Captain Price is described as a signatory to defect reports — a fact about paperwork, and if anything the opposite of concealment. He and his two co-accused are untried. {{SOURCES: 2026-08-12-kaieteur-news-mv-barima-tragedy-internal-records-expose-months-of-warnings-request-for-urgent-repairs | 2026-08-13-kaieteur-news-paper-trail-contradicts-edghills-claims-as-records-show-repeated-warnings | 2026-08-13-hgptv-documents-reveal-repeated-defect-reports-on-mv-barima-months-before-deadly-disaster | 2026-08-12-news-source-guyana-internal-records-reveal-multiple-reported-issues-with-mv-barima-months-before-deadly-tragedy | 2026-08-12-village-voice-mv-barima-warning-signs-were-documented-months-before-deadly-sinking | 2026-08-12-kiskadee-watch-reports-show-numerous-defects-were-cited-on-mv-barima }}

What sits against it, from the state's own record: - DPI, 8 September 2020: a release recording the Barima's history of mechanical failures. ⚠️ Do not quote. That file is a tool-condensed capture whose own note states only the Edghill quotation inside it is verbatim — and that quotation is about engaging India, not the vessel. Treat the mechanical-failure characterisation as the substance of a government release, not as anyone's words. - DPI, 20 September 2024: repairs pending, "more than 80 years of service." - DPI, 10 March 2025: the T&HD has "longstanding issues of negligence, mismanagement, and accountability." (Verbatim, file unflagged — the strongest state admission in the corpus.) - March 2026: a tender putting a further G$124.5m into the hull, four months before the sinking. Per unbylined CMC copy in the Jamaica Observer (25 July), voiced by APNU MP Saiku Andrews, the bill of quantities required examination of about 10,000 m² of hull plating and frames "with deteriorated sections to be renewed where necessary." Read the conditional carefully — this is a specification anticipating deterioration, not a survey establishing it. It has been reported as though it were a finding. - Capt. R. E. W. Adams, Stabroek News, 2 October 2015, on this named vessel: deck, winch and generator area "a mass of junk and rust," and such a ship would be barred from sea or scrapped elsewhere in the Caribbean.

What the corpus does and does not contain. The seaworthiness statements in the corpus rest on a docking chronology — last docked 2024, next due latter half of 2026. No source in the corpus names a class certificate, a passenger safety certificate, or a load-line survey date. The "not overloaded" statement rests on a capacity figure that MARAD's Director-General said he could not trace back from the 1938 rating, and which he and Edghill stated differently. Neither the claim that she was overloaded nor the claim that she was not can be checked against a published document, because no certified capacity has been published.

Why a load line cannot answer the overloading question, and where the fault for that sits. Single source This page has recorded that the "not overloaded" finding rests on an observation of the hull rather than on a certificate. Millington puts the technical case for why that observation cannot answer the question, and he locates the fault in the statute rather than in the regulator. In his words: "A load line measures reserve buoyancy at a given displacement. It measures total weight and water density. It is entirely indifferent to where that weight is." It does not measure metacentric height, the righting-lever curve, the area under that curve, the angle of vanishing stability, free-surface effect, the downflooding angle, passenger crowding, or whether the vessel is already taking water. "Every one of those determines whether a vessel capsizes. Not one is measured by the mark on her side."

On why MARAD used it anyway, he is explicit that this is not a criticism of the regulator: "the load line is the only quantitative loading control Guyanese law gives for this class of vessel. There are no intact stability criteria, no prescribed content for stability information under s. 290, no duty to calculate a departure condition, no approved loading conditions, and no passenger-crowding criterion. A regulator with a load line and nothing else will use the load line."

Read against the survivor accounts in section 6 — cargo stacked at the stern, a list that failed to right — that is a statement about what the available instrument can and cannot detect. It is an analysis of the statute book and not a finding about this voyage, and it is subject to the L.R.O. 1/2012 limitation stated at the head of this page.

On the machinery, the 2017 rehabilitation is described as including "installation of two engines"; whether the original Paxman engines were entirely replaced is not established in the corpus. The figure of 87 years is therefore supported for the hull and not for the machinery.

Single source Andrew Donald, who says he commanded the Barima during twelve years at the T&HD, is carried by HGPTV on 29 July, from a statement posted to Facebook by MP Ganesh Mahipaul, and by Kiskadee Watch on 30 July. Where his account bears on the figures on this page: he describes the Barima as a single-hull passenger vessel operating contrary to the standards of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea; says it had no hull tanks capable of containing incoming water and no operational bilge system powerful enough to control serious flooding; and puts the crew's margin after an underwater breach at five to ten minutes. He dismisses the focus on whether dry-docking was overdue, arguing the vessel's problems were more fundamental than its repair schedule — which is set against Edghill's docking chronology of last docked 2024, next due in the second half of 2026. He calls for public examination of the vessel's safety certificates, inspection history, loading records, dry-docking schedule, passenger and cargo limits, freeboard and draft; none of those documents appears in the corpus, so none of his claims can be checked against one. HGPTV states that the claims "have not been independently verified" and that Donald named no individuals. Until 30 July no other outlet in the corpus carried him; Kiskadee Watch has since published the same account at greater length, which corroborates the report without supplying a second witness, since both rest on Donald.

6. Proximate cause — three incompatible accounts

Official: rough seas at a known-hazardous location compounded by crew impairment. Thomas's stability argument — a vessel with positive stability rights itself even at twenty degrees of heel, so failure to right indicates human operational error.

Survivors, before departure Contested: two passengers interviewed by Kiskadee Watch describe machinery trouble before the vessel sailed. A survivor identified as Adreiena states the engine stopped twice before departure; businessman Donald Modeste states the ferry was stuck on a sandbank at the wharf for almost an hour and then sailed on one engine with a mechanic having worked on it. Minister Edghill stated there was no engine or mechanical problem and no reported engine trouble on departure. The two accounts are irreconcilable as stated and are not reconciled anywhere in the corpus.

Survivors, at sea: a progressive loss of stability over four hours. Leon Murray (AP): "packed, packed, packed all downstairs"; one engine lost at about 19:00 and repaired at sea rather than returning to port; a water-ingress warning at about 20:00 answered with "They told us this is normal." Elena Moonsammy is the sole source for cargo stacked at the stern. Wayne Kitson describes a list that failed to right. Thomas's stability explanation and the survivor accounts of loading were not reconciled in any source in the corpus.

Systemic: an 87-year-old hull kept on a route with no alternative while a US$12.7m replacement idled, and a second vessel, the Kalliopi N, sat uncommissioned at the Kingston Goods Wharf since May awaiting a presidential ceremony.

Sinking duration Contested: about four minutes (Murray) versus "less than a minute" (Guyana Times).

Grounding Single source: Janette Bulkan states the vessel became stuck on a mudbank offshore Iron Punt. No official account mentions it.

7. Rescue response

The Mayday, read exactly. A 23:01 distress call is the spine of every published timeline in the corpus, and it is not a media construction: the government's own Department of Public Information stated on 19 July that a distress call was received at around 11:01 p.m., and the state-owned Guyana Chronicle repeated it on 23 and 24 July. On 25 July Prime Minister Phillips said "We have no such record" — but of a compound proposition: that the captain issued a Mayday and told passengers to put on life jackets. That is a denial about the captain's conduct, not a denial that a signal reached the state. This archive previously recorded it as a flat contradiction of the 23:01 call. That was too strong, and it has been corrected.

What survives the correction is the harder problem: no government statement anywhere in the corpus identifies who received the call, the three outlets naming air traffic control are all foreign while the two naming the Timehri control tower are Guyanese, and the Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Centre log was publicly requested on 25 July and has never been produced.

[CONFLICT WITH THIS ARCHIVE — a possible reconciliation, flagged and not adopted.] Millington's document gives the distress signal as 22:43, against the 23:01 this archive carries from the Department of Public Information and the BBC. He further states that on the night "the distress signal reached an aviation authority at 22:43 and took twenty minutes, through two intermediaries, to reach the maritime rescue authority."

If that account is correct it would do two things at once. It would reconcile the two times rather than choose between them — one being when a signal first reached the state, the other being when it reached the body responsible for maritime rescue, about eighteen to twenty minutes later. And it would explain the split in the corpus recorded immediately above, in which the outlets naming air traffic control as the recipient are the foreign ones: on this account air traffic control is who actually received it first, and 23:01 is the maritime timestamp.

This archive records the conflict and has not resolved it, and the reconciliation is not adopted. Three reasons. The document is an analysis of the statute book, not an investigation, and its author states he has no access to any witness or record of the night. It supplies no source for either the 22:43 timing or the two intermediaries, and this archive holds nothing against which to check them. And the rescue coordination log — which is the one document that would settle it — has been requested publicly and never produced. The archive continues to carry 23:01 as the figure the state itself published, with 22:43 recorded here as a single-source alternative and a possible explanation of the two-times problem rather than as a correction to it. Note also that it does not touch the Prime Minister's "no such record" statement, which was about the captain's conduct rather than about when a signal arrived.

Gouveia was airborne at 01:36, two and a half hours after the reported Mayday, in a fixed-wing Islander. Bulkan asks why the rescue helicopters and trained swimmers at the Omni Helicopters base at Ogle never launched. Two GDF helicopters were reported unserviceable — raised by the opposition via News Americas Now (19 July) and addressed by GDF officials via Kaieteur (23 July).

Who found the wreck [CONTESTED, possibly sequential]: fisherman Haresh Singh located the hull and directed the Coast Guard to fire flares (Guyana Times); Roraima Airways — private — reported the coordinates (Demerara Waves); ExxonMobil seabed mapping and sonar located it (UPI). These may be stages of one process rather than rival claims, but no source sequences them. Single source The detail that Exxon sent three offshore supply vessels and that divers came from "Exxon or the French" is Bulkan's alone.

Pan Pan Unresolved: whether an urgency call preceded the Mayday by four hours is asked by Bulkan and answered by no one. Her letter is also the only source in the corpus for Guyana's SOLAS accession on 10 December 1997, effective 10 March 1998 — a checkable fact that has not yet been independently checked.

Demerara Waves reports that, except for the GDF, the government had no crisis-communications response on the first night. The qualifier matters.

8. Why the replacement never sailed Contested

• Wharf works: PM Phillips, 25 July — delayed Port Kaituma wharf works meant the Ma Lisha could not run the route.
• Cargo capacity: residents and contemporaneous reporting — the vessel could not carry the route's cargo, so the Barima stayed and was re-tendered.

The two accounts are not mutually exclusive: one describes incomplete wharf infrastructure, the other a mismatch between the vessel's specification and the route's cargo. The Ma Lisha was commissioned in 2023, and Parliament was told in 2023 that it would replace the Barima and the Kimbia.

9. Compensation and funeral costs as reported

The reported figures are funeral-expense figures, not compensation. APNU's Saiku Andrews: "It starts with an assistance for the funeral expenses and I believe that there is no less than $1M…", and some families "have been offered a mere $300,000 for funeral expenses." Phillips's position on the wider question is sequencing: "The focus now is not on compensation. The focus is on recovering bodies, financing the burial and funeral rites…" He has also characterised the payments made so far directly — "That is not deemed compensation. That is the government's responsibility in times like this to assist families" — and said compensation itself will be determined after the Commission of Inquiry reports. (This page previously stated that no official had characterised the payments as "not compensation." That was wrong; the statement is in Caribbean National Weekly of 24 July.) Separately, Edghill confirmed on 22 July that the state assumed the risk on an uninsured vessel, which means any eventual compensation is a treasury matter rather than an insurance claim.

10. Smaller discrepancies worth tracking

The last row concerns an accused person who has not been tried. It is recorded because the published particulars differ, and for no other reason; the archive takes no view on guilt or innocence.

Vessel particulars and route context as given in the submission. Single source for anything not already in the corpus. Millington gives 284 grt / 111 nrt; 40.26 m × 8.87 m; draft 7.5 ft; twin screw; built by Ferguson Brothers (Port Glasgow) Ltd as yard no. 340; launched 9 May 1939; registered at Georgetown on 17 November 1939. The net tonnage of 111, the draft, the twin-screw arrangement, the yard number, the launch date and the registration date are new to this archive; the builder and the 1939 date corroborate the Paxman register, which is the strongest provenance source in the corpus and dates the hull to 1939 against the 1938 that Kaieteur gives. On life-saving equipment he gives 250 lifejackets, 6 inflatable liferafts and 2 rigid liferafts, which is the Phillips version above rather than the Edghill one.

On the route he gives Region One (Barima-Waini) a population of 38,956 at the 2022 census and states there is no road to Georgetown. Neither figure is otherwise in this corpus, and both bear on the limitation point at the head of this page: the people with the strongest possible claims are the people furthest from the courts, and the vessel that connected them is on the seabed.

None of the length figures affects his central statutory finding, which turns only on the vessel exceeding 24 metres. Every rendering in this corpus — 40.26 m, 38.6 m, 126.5 ft, 125 ft 9 in — does. (The 38.6 m is new on 1 August, from MARAD's own salvage notice, and is the fourth rendering; its beam and depth, 8.9 m and 2.9 m, agree closely with the others, so only length diverges.)

11. Claims resting on a single source

Flagged because they are consequential and uncorroborated. Each is a priority for verification.

The Millington submission is now the largest single-source contributor on this page, and everything taken from it is flagged where it appears. Resting on it alone: the 24-metre gap and the "except passenger ships" carve-out; the absence of any counting duty; the technical case against the load line as an answer to the overloading question; the reg. 13(3) Board of Trade capacity rule; the net tonnage, draft, twin screw, yard number, launch and registration dates; the Region One population and the absence of a road; the 22:43 distress timing and the two intermediaries; and the Cap. 49:04 s. 23 limitation reading with which this page opens. Two qualifications attach to all of it. It is an analysis, not a record, and its author states he has no access to the wreck, the certificates, the stability book, the manifest or any witness. And the consolidation he read is current only to L.R.O. 1/2012, so every claim of his framed as the absence of a regulation needs checking against post-2012 instruments and the Official Gazette — which he says himself rather than leaving it to a reader to find.

Bulkan's letters carry an unusual share of the load: the mudbank grounding, the unanswered Pan Pan question, the SOLAS accession dates, and the Exxon vessel and diver detail. Demerara Waves alone reports the ten already-home "survivors" and the absence of a crisis-communications response outside the GDF. Guyana Times alone has Haresh Singh instructing the Coast Guard to fire flares. Elena Moonsammy alone describes cargo stacked at the stern. The March 2026 hull-plating specification reaches the corpus only through unbylined CMC copy voiced by an opposition MP. The uninsured-vessel disclosure and the presence of machinery and ATVs aboard come through Kaieteur and HGPTV. Venezuelan families disputing earthen burials is Kaieteur alone. Patterson's claim that expert procurement advice was disregarded is post-disaster and unverified. Aporrea alone frames the sinking as having occurred in Venezuelan-claimed waters. Andrew Donald's account of the vessel's construction, its want of hull tanks and bilge capacity, and the five-to-ten-minute margin after a breach reaches the corpus through HGPTV and, from 30 July, Kiskadee Watch — two outlets relaying one man, which states that it has not been independently verified. The characterisation of the DPP as having stated that the vessel's navigational and safety systems were defective is Demerara Waves' alone, and is the outlet's own wording rather than anything she is quoted as saying. The vigil detentions' resolution — charges dropped, apology given — rests on the activists' own statement; no police or government statement appears in the corpus, and the event was a government national prayer service rather than a candlelight vigil.

12. Reliability guidance for this corpus

Earliest or most directly sourced: the Paxman History Pages engine register (pre-disaster, apolitical, corroborates build year, yard, ordering chain and dimensions independently of all disaster coverage — every figure in it was verified); DPI's own pre-disaster releases, which are admissions against interest; the 2015 Adams letter; and AP's original on-the-ground reporting (Drake in Charity, Wilkinson in Georgetown), which is the origin of most survivor testimony everyone else recycles and the only source for the decades-old practice of clerks selling unmanifested seats.

Handle with care: 592Hub, an aggregator and the sole source of several specification figures. Any Guyanese outlet's account of an opposing party's motives. Figures attributed to "officials" without a named speaker. Note that Elena Moonsammy (Guyanese press; lost seven children she travelled with) and Helena Moonsammy (AP and Gleaner; a grandmother who lost four grandchildren and spent nine hours in the water) may be two different people — the archive does not establish that they are one person with variant spellings, and earlier drafts of this analysis wrongly assumed so.

A submitted analysis is a different kind of document from everything else here, and is weighed differently. The Millington submission is not journalism, not a state release and not a social media post; it is an unsolicited expert analysis, held and published in full, and it is labelled as a submitted analysis wherever it appears. It is not corroboration of anything, because it is one person's reading rather than a second witness. What makes it usable is that it supplies its own reasoning and its own citations — chapter and section, from an authorised consolidation it names — so a reader with the statute book can check it, which is not true of most single-source material on this page. Where it states a fact about the night of 18 July rather than a reading of a statute, it carries no more weight than any other uncorroborated account, and the 22:43 timing in section 7 is treated on exactly that footing.

Files carrying a capture_fidelity, fidelity or verbatim: false warning must never be quoted as verbatim; their direct quotations are reliable, their connective prose is the retrieval tool's compression. This applies to the 2020 DPI release, the Christena Wikipedia capture, and the vigil-detentions report, all of which are cited above with that caveat attached.

Absent from the corpus entirely: any published certificate of survey, load line or passenger capacity; any Auditor General finding specific to the T&HD; any trade union statement; any gazetted terms of reference for the Commission of Inquiry; any IMO statement; any MARAD advisory or notice to mariners; and any official statement of the number of counts charged. PAHO left this list on 30 July: its Country Representative in Guyana, Dr Kim Eva Dickson, praised the state's response in Region One — but she did so at the signing of an unrelated One Health agreement, not at a Barima event and not as the product of any assessment mission, and the remarks are public-health rather than maritime. Also still absent: the statutory instruments themselves. The corpus now holds a detailed reading of Cap. 49:01, Cap. 49:04, Cap. 49:07 and Cap. 50:01, with sections cited, but it does not hold the authorised texts, the subsidiary regulations, or anything from the Official Gazette. Every statutory proposition on this page is therefore a named person's account of an instrument this archive has not read.