The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

by Clive Cussler

  “If we become separated,” Ida said, “just swim for shore. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Form a bucket brigade,” Marcus Anthony shouted, “and hook another hose to the spigot.”

  This was day laborer Paul Endicott’s first day on the water. His trade was that of an apprentice cobbler, but times were so good that people were purchasing new shoes instead of having the old ones repaired. His work was slow and he needed money, so he’d signed on for a day of work.

  “Where are the buckets?” Endicott asked Anthony.

  “Damn,” Anthony said loudly, “they’re in the forward storeroom.”

  “What should I do?” Endicott asked.

  “Climb up to the pilothouse and explain our problems to the captain,” Anthony said. “Ask him to make his way to shore.”

  It was bad, and Reverend Haas knew this. The fire had spread to the bow deck, and with the ship still moving forward, the flames were being fanned backward onto the mid and rear decks. All around him there was confusion — he watched as another hose was hooked to the spigot. This one burst only feet from the knob. The life vests Haas had been able to secure were rotted and deteriorating. Even so, with help from a few of the other adults, he strapped in the children and tried to line them up on the rear deck.

  “We’ll try to make North Brother Island,” Van Schaick said, after Endicott’s report, “and run her aground.”

  North Brother Island was three miles away.

  “Full steam,” Van Schaick shouted down to the engine room.

  With smoke and embers flying from her bow, General Slocum raced upriver.

  * * *

  Captain McGovern was on his dredge boat Chelsea. He looked up as General Slocum steamed past at full speed, trailing smoke. He watched the decks as a mass of people ran aft. They piled up along the wooden railing until it gave way and nearly a hundred passengers were pitched into the water. Making his way down to his steam-powered launch Mosquito, McGovern headed to the site to try to rescue those swimming.

  * * *

  At the bathhouse at 134th Street and the East River, Helmut Gilbey had just settled into a wooden Andirondack chair for a day of fresh air and sunshine. Seeing the burning steamer running upriver, he ran out to the street and flagged down the first police officer who happened past.

  “There’s a steamer burning on the river,” he said breathlessly.

  Michael O’Shaunassey looked between the buildings and caught a glimpse of General Slocum. Racing down the street to the precinct house, he sounded the alarm.

  The precinct house emptied as the police fanned out in search of boats.

  Boats were dispatched from the Seawanhaka Boat Club and the Knickerbocker Yacht Club while the police boats of the Twelfth Street substation were readied. Within minutes, the fireboat Zophar Mills and the Health Department’s tug Franklin Edson pulled from their docks and chased after the burning steamer. At the same time, two nearby ferryboats diverted from their runs to comb the waters for survivors.

  * * *

  Van Schaick was captain of a dying ship. His crew’s inexperience, combined with the shoddy fire hoses and a myriad of other problems, had proved to be General Slocum’s undoing. His decision to run at full speed for North Brother Island had not helped matters any — the winds had fanned the flames into a near maelstrom. Followed by two dozen boats, Van Schaick ran his command hard aground.

  * * *

  John Tischner was trembling. His day of fun and frivolity had turned into a horror that his young mind could not comprehend. Tears streaked down his face as he tugged at the straps on his rotting life vest. At that instant the ship’s keel struck earth, and Tischner was tossed to the deck. Peering up, he could see that the paddle wheels were still spinning wildly. Crawling through the legs of the panic-stricken adults, he made his way to where the railing had broken away and rolled into the water. As soon as the life vest met water, it became waterlogged and pulled him under.

  * * *

  The shock of running aground collapsed part of the hurricane deck, spilling nearly a hundred passengers directly into the center of the fire. Their screams grew loud as their flesh was burned from their bones. Several passengers were tossed directly atop the spinning paddle wheels, where their bodies were battered, then pulled under.

  Reverend Haas managed to toss nearly eighty of the younger children into the water before a burning timber from the upper deck slammed into his shoulder and brought him to his knees. Hair on fire, he tried to roll off the deck but was sucked under by the paddle wheels.

  “Amelia,” Ida shouted, “Amelia.”

  But there was no answer.

  Ida had no way to know this, but Amelia Swartz had leapt from the burning ship a mile back. At this instant, Captain McGovern on Mosquito was fishing her from the water, more dead than alive. Racing aft while shouting her name, Ida stepped upon a section of smoldering deck that gave way underfoot. Falling through up to his shoulders, Ida struggled to climb back out again.

  Nurse Agnes Livingston paused just outside the main doors to the Municipal Hospital on North Brother Island. She watched as a man, his hat ablaze, crept from the small house at the highest point of the burning ship. The man climbed over the railing, then dived into the water. Livingston had no way to know that Captain Van Schaick had abandoned ship.

  “Let’s go,” Dr. Todd Kacynski shouted, as he raced out of the hospital.

  Livingston followed Kacynski to the shoreline. A nurse hardened by years of service, she was conditioned to blood and gore. Still, the sight of blackened and burned bodies washing up on shore sickened her. Walking a few feet away, she vomited into a bush, then tidied her white hat and headed back into the fray.

  Big Jim Wade steered his tug Easy Times toward the burning excursion boat. What he saw was a horrific sight. The top deck had collapsed into the center of the vessel, and the additional fuel stoked the fires. Flames shot skyward with a column of dirty black smoke. The paddle wheels had stopped spinning, and several people were clutching the wooden paddles in an effort to stay clear of the flames. Wade approached along the starboard side. He could see large sections of railing that had given way under the crush of passengers, and pockets of people clustered fore and aft.

  Without thought of the danger, he eased Easy Times alongside the burning hull.

  Back in the city, a reporter with the Tribune called his office from police headquarters. “The excursion boat General Slocum, carrying a Sunday school group, is ablaze in the East River. Casualties will be high,” he finished.

  The Tribune editor arranged for photographers and reporters to be sent to the scene.

  Mayor McClellan paced the floors of his office in City Hall. “The police commissioner reports that he has sent all his available men to the scene,” he said to his aide. “Make sure the fire chief is pulling out all the stops, as well.”

  The man started for the door.

  “What’s the number for City Hospital?” McClellan shouted at the retreating man.

  “Gotham 621,” the man shouted back.

  McClellan reached for the telephone.

  “This is the mayor,” he shouted into the phone. “Give me the head of operations.”

  “Pull them across,” Wade shouted to his deckhands out of the window of the pilothouse, “then send them aft.”

  Glancing toward the transom, Wade could see several blackened bodies floating close to his propellers. There was nothing he could do — he needed propulsion to stay close to the steamer and to be ready to back away at a moment’s notice. He watched as a corpse swirled in the propellers’ whirlpool, then was sucked under and shredded.

  He turned back to the bow.

  “Get them off there,” he screamed.

  Little Germany on the Lower East Side was in chaos. Relatives of the passengers on General Slocum jammed the elevated train platforms from Fourteenth Street to First Street in an effort to board an uptown train. Rumors ran through the crowd as the tension grew. Outside St. Mark�
�s Church, a crowd grew large. Parents with tearstained faces awaited word of a miracle that would never come.

  The captain of Zophar Mills was directing a stream of water at the burning center of General Slocum. The visible flames were gone, but the wreckage was still smoldering. The water around his fireboat was littered with the corpses of adults and children. His crew had managed to pluck nearly thirty people from the water, and they huddled on the stem deck like refugees from a violent war.

  At that instant, a rumbling was heard from General Slocum, and the ship rolled to one side.

  * * *

  Nurse Livingston had grown numb to the suffering. The shore of North Brother Island looked like a battlefield. She no longer heard the moans of the dying — the screams of the burned and injured were much louder. Dr. Kacynski had administered the fifty doses of morphine he had brought along.

  “Nurse Livingston,” he shouted over the screams, “return to the pharmacy. I need all the stores of pain medication we have available.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Livingston said.

  She began jogging toward the hospital, momentarily free from the horrors.

  * * *

  Wade had done all he could. General Slocum was awash, only one side of the paddle wheel and a portion of the fore deck above water. Backing away from the wreckage, he turned Easy Times ninety degrees and set off for New York City with his load of sick and injured.

  The hospital on North Brother Island was filled to overflowing.

  “At least five hundred, maybe a thousand,” Alderman John Dougherty reported over the telephone to Mayor McClellan.

  “Good Lord,” McClellan exclaimed, “maybe there will be more survivors.”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” Dougherty said. “The steamer is awash.”

  “I want you to find the commander of Engine Company 35,” McClellan said.

  “The fire on board is out, sir,” Dougherty said.

  “I know, John,” McClellan said wearily. “I want the firemen to help the coroner to identify the bodies.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dougherty said.

  “I’ll send some boats across to bring the bodies back to the pier at East Twenty-sixth Street,” McClellan said. “The families of the deceased can retrieve the bodies there.”

  * * *

  On the East River, New York City police boats were dragging the river for bodies. By seven that evening, they had retrieved more than two hundred. It was dark when the coroner stood over another blackened body.

  “Check the pockets,” he said to a fireman.

  The man rolled the body over and removed a soggy leather wallet from the pocket.

  “George Pullman,” the fireman said, as he stared at the name on a library card, “and there’s a check here for $300 made out to the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company.”

  The coroner nodded. “I knew George,” he said quietly. “He was the treasurer of the St. Mark’s Sunday School.”

  The fireman nodded.

  “At least these bastards never got paid,” the coroner said angrily.

  * * *

  General Slocum’s hold still held some air, and the ship was drifting on the current. After traveling a short distance, the hulk grounded off Hunt’s Point. A diver was sent down into the hull. He found nearly a dozen bodies trapped in the wreckage. He brought them to the surface one by one.

  The last was a lad nine years old who was clutching a prayer book in his hands.

  As soon as the heavy dive helmet was removed, the diver burst into sobs. As his boat made its way back to the city, the diver sat on the stem deck, alone with his thoughts. General Slocum was his last dive ever.

  * * *

  Joe Flarethy, a lieutenant with the New York City Police Department, stared at the man on the stretcher at the hospital on North Brother Island with barely concealed disgust. The man’s leg had been fractured when he’d leapt from General Slocum.

  “I understand you’re Captain Van Schaick,” Flarethy spat.

  “I am,” Van Schaick said.

  “You’re under arrest by order of the mayor,” Flarethy said. “Now, why don’t you make it easy on us and point out the rest of your crew?”

  Van Schaick raised himself up on his elbows. “I’m the captain,” he said. “I’m responsible. You want to identify the crew, you do it yourself.”

  Flarethy turned to the sergeant at his side. “Go bed to bed and ask the patients for identification. The seamen should have papers. Anyone that doesn’t — tag their toe and we’ll sort through them later.”

  He turned back to Van Schaick.

  “A real hero, aren’t you? Trying to protect your crew.” Flarethy pointed out the window toward the river. “The time to be a hero was out there.”

  Van Schaick said nothing.

  “Cuff this son of a bitch,” Flarethy said to a patrolman standing nearby.

  * * *

  “The Twenty-Sixth Street morgue is full,” Mayor McClellan said over the telephone to Dougherty. “We can’t take any more bodies.”

  “Hold on,” Dougherty said.

  McClellan heard snippets of conversation as Dougherty spoke to someone nearby.

  “Okay, sir,” he said after a few moments, “there’s an abandoned coal shed just to the side of the hospital we can use as a makeshift morgue.”

  “Excellent,” McClellan said.

  “There’s just one thing,” Dougherty said.

  “What’s that?” McClellan asked.

  “We’ll need another boatload of ice to chill the bodies.”

  “I’ll have it sent over immediately.”

  * * *

  There was a dim electric light illuminating the Twenty-sixth Street Pier as the first load of coffins was unloaded from the boats. Ice had been placed in the coffins to keep the bodies from decomposing, and as it melted it ran through the cracks in the wood and stained the street. Hundreds of ashen-faced parents had gathered to see if they could locate their missing children. A few survivors straggled off the boats. Most were half-dressed or slightly injured in some way. Almost all were adults. They hung their heads in shame.

  Halfway up a ladder, in the center of the crowd, was a fireman from Engine Company Number 35. As the 432 caskets were carried past, he shouted out the names of the dead that had been identified. The wails from mourning parents filled the area around the pier. Those that had not been identified were stacked in neat rows waiting for space to open up at the morgue.

  * * *

  The morning following the disaster dawned clear and warm. Throughout New York City, flags flew at half-mast. At City Hall, Mayor McClellan learned that bodies were still washing up on the banks of the East River. He made the arrangements for collection and burial, then turned his attention to preventing another such disaster. First, he instituted a free “Learn to Swim” program. Second, he ordered all excursion boats in New York Harbor to cease operations until the vessels were checked and approved. Third, he began a full-scale investigation into the General Slocum tragedy.

  When the final count was tallied, 1,021 passengers had perished.

  But General Slocum was not finished.

  * * *

  Diver Jackson Hall stood on the side of the hull above water and shouted across the water to the captain of the salvage ship Francis Ann. He had spent the last hour inspecting the hull, which was resting on the bottom of the East River off Hunt’s Point.

  “You can pick me up now,” Hall shouted across the water.

  “How’s she look?” the captain shouted back.

  “She can be raised,” Hall said. “The lower hull is intact — it’s the upper decks that sustained the most damage.”

  “What’s she look like inside?” the captain questioned.

  “Lots of blackened wood is piled in the center,” Hall said. “I was nearly hung up twice. The boilers appeared intact but bent. The port paddle wheel is shredded from the weight of the hulk pressing down.”

  “What’s the surface like below the hulk?”r />
  “It felt like soft mud,” Hall noted.

  “Then we can get straps under the hull,” the captain said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hall said.

  “Then we’ll come alongside to pick you up,” the captain said, as he walked back toward the pilothouse.

  “Good,” Hall muttered under his breath.

  His inspection of General Slocum had made him uneasy. Ghosts of a thousand souls seemed to inhabit the inner sanctum he had entered. Twice he had thought he felt arms grab for him. Once he had caught sight of what he thought was an apparition out of the comer of his faceplate. When he turned his head and glanced through the murky water, he’d realized that it was part of a canvas top covering flapping in the current. Still, Hall had been spooked. He finished his inspection in record time.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, General Slocum was above water once again. The burned hulk was towed to a shipyard in New Jersey, where the top decks were razed and the wreckage in the hull removed and scrapped. Over the next few weeks, the hull was converted into a barge and rechristened Maryland.

  She, too, would meet with an inglorious end.

  * * *

  The coast off the eastern seaboard of the United States can be a dangerous place when the winds of winter whip the surface of the sea. Captain Tebo Mallick of the towboat Gestimaine was a salty dog. Thirty-seven of his fifty years on the planet had been spent at sea, and he’d learned to read the signs on the water like they were lit with spotlights. Tonight, the sea off Atlantic City, New Jersey, was no place for man nor ship. Towering waves were rolling from east to west, the tops frosted with foamy white. Sheets of cold rain rattled the pilothouse windows like sand shot from a cannon. He stared toward land.

  “I can barely see the lighthouse,” he said to a cat that lay atop the chart desk.

  Then he swiveled and tried to look astern. Somewhere in the fog, a hundred yards to the rear and attached to his ship by a thick hemp line, was a barge loaded with furnace coke named Maryland. At just that second, a wave broke over his bow as the door to the pilothouse opened. The light from the brass fuel oil lamp hanging from the ceiling flickered and almost went out.