Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  James J. Owens, a bricklayer, was hard at work on the renovation of the hospital’s exterior when he spied the burning boat as it approached 132nd Street, about a third of a mile from the island. His shouts of “Steamer afire!” as he ran for the shore were enough to draw the notice of a fellow workman who pulled the island’s fire alarm. Since the staff held frequent fire drills, it was not long before a makeshift fire battalion stood ready for action atop the seawall overlooking the beach when the floating bonfire came crunching in upon the rocks.

  Likewise standing at the ready or running across the lawn were doctors, nurses, and other members of the hospital staff. Some had received advance warning of the steamboat’s arrival, while others simply saw it coming and dropped what they were doing. Doctors, head nurses, and other persons of authority shouted for the hospital workers to stay on the shore and wait for the people in the boats to bring victims ashore for medical attention. But the sight of so many people fighting for life in the water only twenty or thirty feet away proved too much to take, and soon staffers broke ranks and rushed into the chilly water. Most who did so were risking their lives, since few knew how to swim.

  Psychologists have long pondered the question of why some people, when suddenly confronted with a situation of great peril, instinctively take heroic action while others do little or nothing, as though paralyzed by fear and chaos. Temple University psychologist Frank Farley, the nation’s leading expert on the psychology of heroism, calls such people “situational heroes.” It’s a scenario played out not only on the field of battle, but in crises in everyday life such as car accidents and floods. Sometimes these acts of bravery involve only putting themselves in harm’s way—rushing into a burning building, for example—while others include unusual exhibitions of stamina or strength that later defy explanation. People of medium build have lifted cars off of accident victims, for example, or carried injured people over great distances. Research indicates that while most people experience confusion and indecision in traumatic situations, a select few have the opposite reaction. In spite of all that swirls about them, they instantly enter what might be called a focused manic state that allows them to identify a vital problem and take immediate action with no thought to personal safety. Many who experience this reflexive heroism are later at a loss to explain how and why they did what they did, except to say in one form or another, I just had to do something.

  In the case of the Slocum scene at North Brother Island, these feats of heroism often involved both fearlessness and near-miraculous physical acts. Lulu McGibbon was tending the hospital switchboard when a breath less messenger burst into the room and told her of the burning steamer just about to hit. In a flash, her hands rearranging the tangle of wires on the board, she made emergency calls to the police and fire departments, touching off a massive response by both services. She then called all the nearby hospitals and told them to send medical personnel.

  That done, McGibbon paused to consider what to do next. Ultimately, she knew it was her responsibility to remain at her post. She was always under strict orders to never leave the switchboard unattended, especially in an emergency that might require more calls. But she could hear the commotion out in the hall as nurses, doctors, and staff scrambled to the shore, and she felt an overwhelming urge to join them. And then she was gone, down the hall and out the door, unable to restrain the impulse to do something. As she raced across the lawn toward the beach, nothing could have prepared her, or anyone on North Brother Island that morning, for the horrific scene up ahead. Huge clouds of black smoke billowed upward from a 264-foot-long trough of raging flame that had been the steamboat General Slocum. People, many of them on fire, were pouring over the sides into the river while dozens still clung to the few parts of the wreck unclaimed by the inferno. In the water, countless victims fought to stay afloat while all around them floated those who’d already lost the struggle. “They were thick as leaves in the water,” remembered one witness. Boats of every description worked to pull people in while a few fortunate ones dragged themselves onto the beach and collapsed in a heap.

  Lulu never stopped running, driven onward not only by courage but also by the fact that she possessed a skill quite rare in 1904: she could swim. The loose sand of the beach slowed her pace somewhat, but in seconds she was in the chilly water pulling herself toward two tiny children, one aged three years and the other six months old. The thick, layered clothing of the day made swimming difficult and threatened to drag her under. Still she pressed on, driven forward by a powerful combination of horror and adrenaline, until she reached the infants, tucked both under one arm, and swam for shore. By now dozens of workers and nurses who could not swim were wading out, forming lines by which to pass the rescued to shore. Lulu handed off the babies and returned to the deeper water choked with people fighting to stay afloat. She would save a dozen people before collapsing in exhaustion.

  Joining her in the fray was eighteen-year-old Pauline Puetz, who worked as a nurse at the hospital. She too could swim, and upon reaching the shore she began pulling off her excess clothing. Her fellow workers tried to stop her, fearing she’d drown. “They tried to hold me back by my skirt,” she later recounted, “but I let them pull my skirt off me and rushed into the water in my petticoat.” She swam out to the Slocum’s stern and shouted, “In God’s name, jump! Throw your babies overboard; we’ll catch them.” Again and again she pulled people of all ages to safety.

  It was dangerous work even for the swimmers as panicked passengers lunged at them. Puetz’s valor nearly cost her her life when, after making countless rescues, she returned once more when a large woman who appeared to be dead “caught me by the neck in a death grip.” As they sank, she gagged on the brackish water and felt herself losing consciousness. She kept struggling, though, keenly aware that surrender meant certain death. “I had to fight for my life,” she remembered, and with one last burst of strength she managed to get her hand under the woman’s chin—a technique used in modern lifesaving—and pushed upward until she released her grip. Incredibly, she then swam around her attacker, grabbed her by the hair, and began pulling her to shore. Just before reaching safety the woman attacked again and pulled them both under. Fortunately, the struggle drew the attention of several rescuers, who came to her assistance. Puetz was unconscious when they laid her on the shore. She soon regained her wits and promptly began assisting nearby victims—beginning with bandaging the woman who had nearly drowned her.

  The stories of these and many other heroic rescuers at North Brother Island who exhibited what one reporter called “beautiful recklessness” would be told over and over again in the newspaper accounts that followed. None drew more attention than the story of nurse Nellie O’Donnell. Unlike Puetz and McGibbon, she couldn’t swim. Yet she was the first one into the water, compelled by the vision of so many people in need of help. Us ing an improvised stroke, she paddled out to a small boy, snared him by the collar, and pulled him to another nurse standing in four feet of water. Again and again she ventured out over her head and returned with a child until she’d rescued ten.

  And then there was seventeen-year-old Mary McCann, a patient at the hospital. Born in Ireland, she’d arrived at Ellis Island only a month earlier. There, she was diagnosed with scarlet fever and sent to the Riverside Hospital for contagious diseases on North Brother Island. She had made a nearly complete recovery when the Slocum hit.

  Like Lulu and Pauline, she could swim, but she was weak from her prolonged illness. She plunged into the water and promptly saved a young girl. The moment the child was in safe hands she was back in the water to save another girl and a boy. When heading out to make her fourth save, someone pulled her dress off. It made swimming easier, but with each rescue she moved more slowly. It was on her way back from her fifth rescue that someone grabbed her legs and pulled her under. A workman heard her cry for help and managed to pull her free of her attacker.

  Those who could not swim relied on quick thinking to save dozens. So
me found ropes and gave them to swimmers to take out into the water so that victims could be pulled to safety. Others jumped into some of the many rowboats about the island and proceeded to haul victims to land. At one point someone noticed that ladders were propped against the facade of the hospital and called for them to be brought to the water. “There was no one to go for them,” remembered Kate White, superintendent of the hospital’s nurses, “so I went.” The thirty-five-foot ladders were “dreadfully heavy,” but nonetheless she dragged them to the water, where rescuers waded out to their chins and then extended them to victims beyond their reach. Like so many that day, White could not account for her actions. “I never could have done it if I had been in my senses,” she recalled in a manner typical of instinctual heroes. “I didn’t know or feel anything.”

  Some of the most extraordinary exhibitions of heroism involved victims of the disaster. Many of the swimmers among them struggled to the beach and then, realizing they were at last safe from danger, turned around and went back in to pull a few people to safety. Such decisions required a phenomenal transition in their mental state from wild panic to rational action. They’d just spent twenty minutes fighting for their lives to reach shore, and now, only moments after reaching the final destination, they felt an irresistible compulsion to return to the cruel waters to save their children, their spouses, anyone. One thing that no doubt helped in this mental transition were the desperate shrieks of others on the shore pleading for someone to find their loved ones. Several of these would-be rescuers would not make it to shore a second time.

  That was not the case of one victim-turned-rescuer named Charles Schwartz, Jr., a seventeen-year-old apprentice machinist. What made his effort so remarkable was not merely the number he saved (twenty-two), but his own story of loss and selflessness. An excellent swimmer, Schwartz had already saved two women—including Pastor Haas’s sister Emma—when he saw his mother and grandmother floating facedown. He pulled both ashore and found a doctor to revive them, but it was too late. “It’s no use,” the doctor told him, “we can’t do anything more for your people, my boy.” He was devastated over his loss, haunted by the thought that he might have saved them if he’d only found them sooner. “I felt as though my heart would break,” he later told a reporter.

  Yet where most would be paralyzed by grief and a sense of hopelessness, Schwartz found himself inspired to do whatever he could to help those who still had a chance. Perhaps his age had something to do with it, for teenagers often possess a sense of invulnerability to personal danger. And if he was like most seventeen-year-olds, he’d also read his share of dime novels about heroes real and imagined. As he wept over the corpses of his mother and grandmother, the commotion in the water suddenly caught his attention. “I looked out upon the water and saw that there were yet men, women, and children who might be saved.”

  In a moment he was again in the water. He swam to a man in a rowboat and climbed in. They rowed out a ways and Schwartz dove in again and again, each time returning to the rowboat with a sputtering victim or two. Since their boat was small, they brought the rescued ashore in groups of four or five and returned for more. After Schwartz handed off his twenty- second rescue, they returned to the wreck but found no one left alive to save—they’d run out of time.

  The beaching of the Slocum had slowed the torrid advance of the flames, but only to a degree. Crushed into an ever-shrinking portion of the boat’s stern section, the desperate passengers began to jump or fall, unable to withstand the rising heat that seared their flesh and set afire their hair and clothes. Despite the nearness of the shore and the many boats now surrounding the burning wreck, most of the passengers who hit the water off North Brother Island stood little chance of being rescued.

  The same desperate scenes of panic and raw terror that erupted in the wake of the Slocum fire out on the East River were again played out in the waters near North Brother Island. Only this time they did so with salvation in clear view, a mere twenty, forty, or sixty feet away. Some drowned in water only five feet deep—shallow enough for them to stand in if only they had the presence of mind to do so.

  Some who were unable to swim found themselves alongside the Slocum’s paddle boxes. With the paddle wheels no longer turning, these provided a temporary refuge that kept alive their hopes of being rescued, but for no more than a few minutes. So intense was the heat that it boiled the water about them and seared their skin. “The torture was terrible,” remembered Lena De Luccia. From rescue boats and the shore, victims at the paddle boxes could be seen wilting in the heat, losing consciousness, and slipping into the boiling water without a struggle.

  Officer John Scheuing, the Bronx beat cop who had commandeered the soda wagon and small boat to get to North Brother Island, vowed he’d save at least a handful and rowed his boat for the paddle box. Firemen and crewmen from nearby rescue boats tried to wave him off, fearing that he’d be killed, but Scheuing remained undaunted. The heat blistered his skin and burned his handlebar mustache from his face, and still he pressed on, occasionally dousing himself with a bucket of river water. “There were five faces under that paddle box,” he later explained, “that told me it was my duty to go in there. I heard voices calling out, ‘Mr. Policeman, save us!’ ” Debris from the Slocum rained down on him as pulled up to one of the paddle boxes. Standing precariously balanced with one foot in the rowboat and another on a dripping paddle, Scheuing loaded five people into his boat. Then he shoved away from the groaning hulk toward the shore and watched the raging inferno recede in the distance with every pull on the oars made by his blistered hands.

  By now Sam Berg was on the water. Like Scheuing, he too had been walking along a Bronx side street when he heard the fire alarm and saw people rushing down to the piers. He followed, and when he saw the Slocum pass all aflame, jumped in a small rowboat and with another man rowed frantically out to North Brother Island. Berg was an excellent swimmer and a highly decorated member of the United States Volunteer Life- Saving Corps, but he opted to stay in his boat and pull as many aboard as possible. By his estimate he and his partner pulled fifty victims to safety.

  Stories would later emerge that some rescuers tried to extort money from drowning people before taking them aboard their boat. Others alleged that men stole jewelry off bodies as they floated in the water. While such extraordinary acts of depravity may have occurred, it is more likely that they did not. Only two people reported such incidents, both days after the fire and in one case by a woman who refused to give her name. The stories probably emerged as people on North Brother Island watched rescuers lift and then drop back into the water bodies of those already dead in their search for people they could still save.

  And so it went in the precious few minutes that elapsed between the Slocum’s running aground and the last victim losing the battle to stay afloat and sinking into the murky waters of the East River. It was a scene of absolute chaos, with victims flailing in the water, survivors on the beach calling out for someone to save their child, husband, or sister, and rescuers working furiously to grab as many people as possible before time ran out. The latter worked in their own state of panic, keenly aware that time and simple mathematics were working against them. There were simply too many people in the water to save and not enough rescuers or time to get them out. Each trip into the water brought moments of awful choices— Whom to grab? Whom to leave behind?

  Toward the end of this phase of the ordeal, as great plumes of smoke and flame poured forth from the stranded hulk of the General Slocum and hundreds of survivors and rescuers struggled to get ashore, someone shouted “Look!” There on the top deck a small boy about the age of six could be seen climbing the steamer’s flagpole in a last-ditch attempt to escape the inferno closing in around him. For a moment there seemed to be a lull in the pandemonium around the island’s shore as hundreds held their breath, watching and praying. Upward he inched as the flames grew higher. Finally he reached the top. “Hold on! Hold on!” shouted the onlookers, tho
ugh none seemed to know how he might be plucked safely from his perch. They gasped as the flagpole began to tremble and sway. Still the boy hung on. Then the flagpole suddenly careened backward into the fiery cavity of the vessel, taking with it the last living soul aboard the General Slocum.

  ’Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave, ’Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore, ’Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave. Oh! Hard times, come again no more.

  —STEPHEN FOSTER

  Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

  —SENECA

  MAMA, WAKE UP

  It was all over in a matter of minutes. Rescuers from North Brother Island, passing boats, or the nearby Bronx and Queens shores found that at a certain point in the effort to pull people from the water only the dead remained. Weeping and wailing from North Brother Island could be heard, as could the sounds of the steamboat on fire, but otherwise an eerie calm descended upon the scene. No one could be seen clinging to the wreck or heard flailing in the water. Without any official notice, rescuers became recoverers, tasked with the gruesome responsibility of collecting the bodies. William Muff, owner of the launch Gloria who set out from his boathouse in Queens, found he was able to save people only on his first run. “We made a second trip over the wake of the Slocum,” he recalled. “The water was simply a mass of debris and bodies.”

  Even as the hopes of finding additional survivors in the water dimmed, the efforts to save lives continued on the beach. Most of the doctors and nurses of Riverside Hospital had in the course of their medical training learned the standard technique for reviving a drowning victim. But like so many other medical procedures in that era, it was a rudimentary maneuver aimed at alleviating the most obvious problem (water in the lungs) rather than addressing the larger systemic issue (oxygen deprivation). Many unconscious victims brought ashore that morning would have been easily revived by applying modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, which both removes the water from the lungs and provides oxygen through mouth-to-mouth breathing and circulation via chest compressions.