by Ed O'Donnell
McClellan clung to this thin possibility as the ferry put more and more distance between him and his city hall prison. But in his heart of hearts he feared it was too late. He was trapped in a job he did not want, held captive by a man he detested. No amount of tranquillity at his Long Branch cottage on the Jersey Shore could offset the disturbing thought that dominated his mind: the man who would be president was going nowhere.
An hour or so later, after McClellan landed in New Jersey, a shrill blast from a steam horn on the General Slocum announced that it was time to head home. As soon as its cargo of a thousand exhausted and sunburned revelers was aboard, Capt. William Van Schaick gave the signal and the steamer pulled away from the pier to begin its journey back to Manhattan. The day had gone off without incident, and now all that remained was the fairly routine matter of piloting the boat home safely. It was a journey the captain and his pilots had made more times than they could count and one they could probably accomplish blindfolded. Except for one five-minute portion of the journey: the passage through Hell Gate.
Hell Gate was the narrow, rocky choke point where Long Island Sound met the northern end of the East River. A two-hour differential between the tide in the sound and New York harbor created a massive imbalance of water that resolved itself all day long through Hell Gate. Twice daily the outgoing tide sent water pent up on the sound side exploding through the narrow passage. Twice daily the incoming tide returned the favor. The result was an endless procession of perilous whirlpool churns, riptides, and crosscurrents—features dangerous even on clear days with no wind.
New York had no shortage of colorful and dramatic names for its neighborhoods—The Tenderloin, The Swamp, Millionaire Mile, Hell’s Kitchen. But these were suggestive appellations. Hell Gate was between-the-eyes blunt, no interpretation needed. It was one of the most dangerous passes on the East Coast and the graveyard of hundreds of shipwrecks. The most famous was the British frigate Hussar. It went down in 1780 carrying an enormous quantity of gold and silver coin intended for the pockets of British officers and soldiers then trying to quell the American rebellion. Divers and salvage teams foolish enough to risk it have been looking for the wreck and its cargo ever since.
Truth be told, Hell Gate had been partly defanged a few decades earlier. Fed up with the never-ending stream of shipwrecks, the city pleaded with Washington for help. The Army Corps of Engineers arrived in 1876 and cleared away tons of jagged rock with a series of spectacular dynamite charges. This made Hell Gate safer, but hardly safe. Or as East River pilots liked to say, it went from suicidal to merely treacherous.
This evening, piloted by experienced hands, the Slocum passed through Hell Gate without incident and pressed on toward its destination. For Van Schaick it was just another day in a long and successful career of moving people by steamer from one point to another along coastal waterways. He considered himself the best captain in the business, and his peers surely agreed. Only the year before he’d been honored with an award by the Masters, Mates and Pilots Association for transporting some 30 million passengers without a fatality. In his mind he possessed the three things that mattered most when it came to running a safe steamboat: knowledge, intuition, and experience. No amount of government regulation could replace it.
His employer of the last thirteen seasons, the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, agreed and paid him well for his services. He was a worthwhile investment, as was the new coat of white paint put on the Slocum a few weeks earlier. The company’s president, Frank A. Barnaby, was a tightfisted businessman loath to part with his money. But he recognized that his company sold not merely transportation, but a leisure experience that be gan with the boat’s appearance. The classier it looked, the more bookings and profit he could count on.
Barnaby, as Van Schaick knew only too well, cared far less about the things his customers could not see. In fact, he cared very little for the steamboat business at all, for he considered himself a real estate man first and foremost. The safety regulations regarding passenger steamers as stipulated by the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS) mandated that specific numbers of life preservers and lifeboats be carried on each boat. They also required that fire hoses and standpipes be placed throughout the boat and that crews be trained and drilled regularly in their use. Pipes connected to the boiler were mandated in all holds so that a blast of steam could be used to extinguish a fire.
Barnaby, like many of his fellow steamboat operators, viewed such regulations as annoying and expensive. What made them costly was not compliance, however, but defiance. Every spring the USSIS would send out inspectors to conduct safety inspections on steamboats, and every year brought the same result. Through incompetence, corruption, or both, inspectors routinely gave a boat a quick once-over and granted a passing grade. Only on the rarest of occasions did they actually test a boat’s life preservers and fire hoses. If they indicated an interest in doing so, it usually meant they were angling for a larger bribe to look the other way. But Barnaby’s troubles did not end with a ten-dollar bill clasped into the hand of a departing inspector, for many—out of either honesty or an attempt to avoid suspicion—still filed reports indicating violations and recommending fines as high as two thousand dollars. This then necessitated furious lobbying before USSIS officials in Washington to reduce or eliminate the fines. In recent years Barnaby and his competitors succeeded nearly every time.
Veteran captains like Van Schaick resented the annual inspection nearly as much as Barnaby, for it called into question his competence and opened him up to criticism from Barnaby and possible dismissal if any fines were levied. This year’s inspection had occurred just five weeks earlier. On the morning of May 5, USSIS inspectors Henry Lundberg and John W. Fleming arrived at the pier, clipboards in hand. Fleming, the assistant inspector of boilers for the New York region, had a very specific task and disappeared into the hold to examine the boiler and engine. Lundberg, on the other hand, was an assistant inspector of hulls, which meant he was charged with examining everything but the boiler and engine, from the condition of the hull to the number of lifeboats. He was the one they watched.
That Lundberg was a novice—only five months on the job and still in his probationary period—was obvious. This might work to Van Schaick’s advantage in that his lack of experience—his “training” consisted of following five veteran inspectors on their rounds for three weeks—likely meant that many potential violations would go unnoticed. It might also prove disastrous if Lundberg turned out to be one of those eager reformer- minded crusaders fresh from his civil service exam. Fortunately for Van Schaick, his fears were quickly laid to rest, for Lundberg gave every evidence that he’d been given a thorough old-school training and proved an eager learner. He’d clearly learned that the successful completion of his probationary period and passage to the coveted status of civil service “untouchable” depended not on making trouble, but rather on playing by the unwritten rules of a system of mutual cooperation between the inspector and the inspected.
Lundberg, accompanied by a mate and engineer, took a brief tour of the steamer, pausing here and there to ask a few questions and scribble a few remarks on the USSIS Forms 922 and 923 held tightly in his clipboard. With a stick he poked at the life preservers held in overhead racks, most of them bearing the faded boast “Kahnweiler’s Never-Sink Life Preservers,” and asked the mate to take a few down for closer inspection. The latter purposely showed him some relatively new life preservers in a transparent charade to gain a passing mark for the remaining twenty-five hundred life preservers on board. Had the inspector actually been looking for violations, it would have been obvious—starting with “Passed June 18, 1891” (the year of the boat’s launching) stenciled neatly on their faded canvas coverings—that nearly all of the life preservers on board the Slocum were old and very likely defective. Had he handled one of the decrepit things, he surely would have noticed that the once-solid chunks of cork in them had been reduced to useless dust, with the buoyancy of
dirt. But Lundberg had been schooled by experienced inspectors in the fine art of looking the other way. With the stroke of his pencil the twenty-five hundred life preservers scattered about the Slocum were judged “up to date and of good quality.”
Lundberg showed similar skill in assessing the steamer’s fire hoses and standpipes. The latter were located in several places throughout the boat’s main deck. Neatly coiled above them were fire hoses. Together they gave every appearance that in the event of a fire, the crew could attach the hoses to the standpipes in a matter of seconds. That appearance was all that mattered to Lundberg. He was not at all concerned when his symbolic turning of a few standpipe valves produced no water. That, he was assured, was due to the fact that the boat’s pump was not turned on at that moment. He did not ask them to demonstrate the hoses and pumps, for inspectors were paid on the basis of how many inspections they conducted (i.e., one hundred inspections equaled $1,200, five hundred or more equaled $3,000), and wasted time was wasted income. He’d save additional time by ignoring the many lines on the USSIS form painstakingly prepared by some earnest bureaucrat. Where it asked for specific information about the boat’s fire hoses, such as length and pressure per square inch, Lundberg simply scrawled “in good condition.”
On the Slocum’s upper deck, Lundberg again displayed the skill of a USSIS veteran. There he found the steamer’s six lifeboats in an utterly unusable state. By all appearances they’d never been moved since the Slocum was launched thirteen years earlier. Thick layers of paint had literally glued the boats to their V-shaped chocks on the deck, while wire had been wound through the pulleys on the overhanging davits that were used to launch them in an emergency. No expert eye was needed to see that these boats were more or less permanently attached to the boat. But Lundberg had learned that efficiency, not exactitude, was the mark of a successful USSIS inspector. He dutifully measured each boat, and recorded the information on USSIS Form 923. He also marked all six boats as “swung under davits”—that is, held aloft and ready to be launched at the first sign of danger.
Lastly, Lundberg went belowdecks to inspect the boat’s bulkheads and hull—for what, it was not clear, since he had absolutely no knowledge of steamboat design or potential hazards short of an obvious leak or wood rot. If he were especially diligent, or at least if he sought to convey that image, Lundberg might have poked his head into one of the Slocum’s forward compartments where the boat’s electricity generator and steering machinery were located. Had he done so, he would have noticed that this “lamp room,” as the crew called it, was filled—in violation of USSIS codes—with cans of lamp oil, brass polish, sheets of canvas, oily rags, and many more highly flammable objects. But based on later testimony, it appears that Lundberg avoided this problematic situation altogether.
A few final demonstrative jottings on his forms and Lundberg, along with Fleming, was on his way. Whether the two did so a few dollars richer we’ll never know. But given the permissive culture of the USSIS and the pervasive influence of Tammany Hall corruption, they’d certainly have been judged fools by their fellow inspectors if they hadn’t.
From the perspective of his boss, Van Schaick had done his job and done it well. The General Slocum was cleared to operate for its fourteenth season. At $350 per day to charter it, plus receipts from its daily runs to Rockaway, Barnaby could count on grossing something close to $40,000 by Columbus Day.
As a captain, however, Van Schaick knew he had another standard to answer to, that of his profession. His ultimate responsibility was to ensure the safety of his passengers. This duty was enshrined not merely in the tradition of the sea that called for the captain to be the last man off his vessel, but also in federal laws governing steamboats passed in 1871 and still operative in 1904:
Every captain, engineer, pilot, or other person employed on any steamboat or vessel, by whose misconduct, negligence, or inattention to his duties on such vessel, the life of any person is destroyed, and every owner, inspector, or other public officer, through whose fraud, connivance, misconduct, or violation of law, the life of any person is destroyed, shall be deemed guilty of manslaughter, and, upon conviction thereof before any circuit court of the United States, shall be sentenced to confinement at hard labor for a period of not more than ten years.
But Van Schaick had begun his career in a different era. In the 1860s, Americans accepted the inevitability of accidents (trains, factories) and the powerlessness of the government to do anything about it. What mattered most to men of his generation was knowledge, intuition, and experience. That was what got you through storms, collisions, and fires, not some silly rule dreamed up by some landlubber USSIS official riding a desk in Washington, D.C. And with fifty years under his belt, Van Schaick was perhaps the most experienced and highly regarded captain in the area.
This did not mean that the captain had never had his moments. In one week during the Slocum’s first season, Van Schaick ran aground on a sandbar near Rockaway and a few days later slammed into another steamer. Three years later, in 1894, he collided with a tugboat and ran aground four times, on one occasion causing serious structural damage to the Slocum.A more serious collision occurred in July 1898 when the Slocum struck a lighter off the Battery and received a gash in her bow. More groundings, accidents, and breakdowns occurred in the seasons that followed, but no more than usual for a busy steamer plying the waterways of the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere. On average there were more than 154 accidents and groundings in the New York district each year.
Scrapes like these, however, were expected in the career of any captain. The true measure of one’s worth was not how many accidents they got into, but the ultimate results of them. Van Schaick had the two statistics that mattered most: no lost boats and no lost passengers. By 1904 he was famous for it. Who could possibly presume to tell him how to run a safe boat?
So while Barnaby refused to buy new life preservers and fire hoses and install steam pipes in the hold, Van Schaick refused to conduct fire drills or tests of the equipment. Barnaby saved his precious pennies, Van Schaick his self-respect and pride.
Van Schaick’s self-assuredness regarding the safety of his steamboat was no doubt strengthened by the fact that accidents involving steamboats—other steamboats—happened all the time. Indeed, as if to underscore this perception, later that evening an errant barge forced the steamboat Chester Chapin hard onto the rocks in Hell Gate. Fortunately no one was hurt and the vessel was soon pulled free.
Of course, Van Schaick and the passengers aboard the Chester Chapin knew that sometimes steamboat accidents could be disastrous. Indeed, everyone in America knew this because for decades steamboat horrors on the high seas and inland waterways happened all the time. “Accidents involving destruction of life and property have become so frequent upon the Western rivers,” wrote one observer in 1840, “that we look as regularly, when we open a newspaper, for a steamboat disaster, as for the foreign news.” The same was true of oceangoing steamers. Steam engine explosions were the forerunners of modern-day catastrophic airliner crashes. Just as a jet airliner is utterly vulnerable to the smallest of technological glitches when in flight, so too were steamboats at sea or on rivers and lakes. In the case of the former, a single hairline crack in a plane’s rudder can cause the pilot to lose control of his jet and send it hurtling to the ground, killing everyone on board. Similarly, a fire on board a ship, even one close to shore, often spelled doom for all hands.
Given the large number of steamboats operating out of New York harbor, the city saw its share of steamboat calamities. One of the worst involved the steamboat Henry Clay in 1852. Just minutes after getting under way on a trip up the Hudson River, a fire broke out in the boiler room. What happened next was described in excruciating detail by a local minister in a sermon delivered shortly after the tragedy. “We take a position on the eastern shore of the Hudson,” began Rev. D. M. Seward, “… on a bland and beautiful day in summer. A steamer passes along, her flags gaily streaming in the w
ind, bearing on her side the eminently suggestive name of a recently deceased statesman.” Aboard one could see crowds of jolly passengers enjoying the trip, “none of them dreaming that this hour of sunshine and gladness brings with it the last moments of their early life.” But suddenly there is dense smoke pouring from the steamer, which turns toward the shore at full speed.
It is a moment of awful suspense. The burning steamer rushes onward with fearful momentum and thrusts her prow, fast and deep into the sand! Oh, what a scene of dismay, of distress, of inexpressible agony succeeds. Scores and scores are imprisoned by the flames; between them and the shore intervene, here the raging fire, and there a depth of water, which it requires a swimmer’s skill to pass. Helpless women, trembling between two deaths, draw back from the water with a shudder, and cling to the burning vessel, until the unpitying flames, marching up to their last refuge, cruelly force them off. Timid, lovely children left protectorless, in the wild dismay of the moment, strive to clamber over the deck, and cry piteously for help, until the fierce flame wraps them about as a winding sheet, and their stifled sobs are hushed in death. Many leap overboard at once in frantic desperation, and in their wild and violent struggles force one another down to an instant grave. Stout and brave swimmers are there; they bring some safe to shore, and return again on their heroic errand, but now they are drawn beneath the surface by the desperate grasp of the drowning, and are seen no more.