Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  Lundberg was soon found and spirited into the offices of the USSIS past a group of reporters, who received no answers to their rapid-fire questions. Two hours later, after having had the chance to “collect” his thoughts, Lundberg emerged and took a few questions from the press.

  How did you examine the life preservers? they asked. “I first counted them until I found that there were 3,000 in all,” he began. “Then I made the pile into lots of forty each and each fortieth preserver I examined.” Nearly every one, he asserted, was in good shape and “able to support the weight of any person in the water for a long while.” How did he explain, the reporters asked, the innumerable reports of rotten life preservers? “If any two people try to get a life preserver and struggle for its possession,” said the beleaguered inspector in a blame-the-victims explanation strikingly similar to Barnaby’s, “they could easily break it apart and make it useless.” Had he been shown the Slocum’s fire drill procedure? Yes, he replied, “it was in my mind perfect in every way.” The steamboat was, he concluded, “in first-class A-1 condition and had complied with every requirement of the law. Every life-raft was in good condition. Every life-boat swung freely on its davits.” Lundberg’s statements were greeted with a skepticism that would only grow in the coming weeks.

  That Barnaby’s and Rodie’s instincts were sound became clear by the later afternoon when the Extras! being cranked out by the city’s newspapers began to include accusations of corporate negligence, cowardice, and poor judgment. “Captain Arrested with His Pilots” proclaimed the headline in Martin Green’s Evening World. The front page of Hearst’s Evening Journal carried the headline “Life Preservers Old and Useless.”

  Then came the statement from Coroner Joseph Berry at North Brother Island. Filled with seething indignation at the rising death toll amid mounting evidence of negligence and dereliction of duty, he approached a group of reporters and began speaking. “You may be sure,” he began, “that this most terrible calamity will be investigated by all departments of the City Government.” The district attorney, coroner, and police department, he continued, were cooperating in the effort to fix responsibility for the dreadful calamity. But he made it clear that he had a firm idea where the blame lay. The effort to extinguish the fire, he charged, had been botched. “Had the fire been handled properly, it could have been extinguished without trouble.” Short of that, the crew should have done everything in their power to quell the panic and distribute life preservers. “But this they seem to have overlooked entirely,” the disgusted coroner concluded, “in their mad desire to escape themselves.” The coroner’s point was lost on no one: the fire aboard the General Slocum was indeed a disaster—but it was no accident.

  I MAY YET FIND MY DARLINGS

  As soon as word of the Slocum’s fate reached Little Germany, relatives and friends of those on board raced uptown to the Bronx on elevated trains. Before long, thousands crowded around the piers near 138th Street. In the distance they could see the armada of boats large and small off the edge of a beach filled with rescue personnel. Smoke from the Slocum, now long-departed from the scene, rose off Hunts Point to the northeast. Prevented from reaching the island by policemen, desperate relatives waited for the boatloads of survivors to arrive.

  A second huge crowd massed outside the nearby Alexander Avenue police station, where the first bodies were brought. By 3:00 P.M., one hundred policemen were at work near the station, trying to keep order among a crowd of several thousand people frantic to view the thirty-seven bodies transported there from the island. “Men were cursing and shouting,” wrote an eyewitness of the pitiful scene. “Women were crying, embracing one another, calling out through the crowd to know if any one had heard of this or that one, begging the police to let them in to set their fears at rest.”

  In charge of this makeshift morgue was Bronx coroner Joseph Berry. Surveying the surging crowd outside, he quickly recognized the need for a larger facility—a much larger one—and notified O’Gorman and other officials at North Brother Island to devise an alternative plan. In the meantime he would let as many anxious relatives in to view the dead as possible, but only in clusters of six at a time to prevent overcrowding.

  Most seemed to be men, the fathers, sons, and brothers who went to work that day while their wives, daughters, and sisters enjoyed a day at the shore. Many of these same men, who normally prided themselves on their German stoicism, broke down completely. Eugene Ansel, the deli owner who had learned of his father’s death just minutes before hearing about the Slocum, arrived at the police station on the verge of insanity. He approached a corpse of a woman in her twenties, lifted the sheet covering her face, and fell to his knees. It was his beloved wife, Louisa, he exclaimed. A moment later he repeated the same lamentations over the body of a different woman. Three more times he declared a different body to be that of his wife before two policemen pulled him aside. They had already seen several men do the same thing. Another man could not remember his wife’s name, while another found that the stammering he had conquered as a youth had returned to render him incapable of speech. Ansel was nearly as difficult to understand, but the policemen managed to learn that his wife wore a wedding ring with her initials engraved on the inside. Twenty minutes later the body of a sixth woman—previously misidentified—was identified as Louisa Ansel by her wedding ring. The bodies of Ansel’s two boys, Alfred and Eugene, Jr., were not there, and Ansel left to look for them in the hospitals.

  Not long after, Paul Liebenow and his brother-in-law Frank Weber rushed in. Like many survivors that afternoon, they entered covered in bandages and exhibiting cuts, bruises, and burns. They looked wildly around the station for their missing children but found nothing. Seeing their distress, Coroner Berry approached and asked several questions about the children in an effort to help, but the men were so distraught they were unable to speak coherently. After examining the remaining bodies, the two dashed out the door headed for one of the hospitals.

  Not all the news was bad at the police station. Every now and again a relative found a survivor in the rooms set aside for the injured and those young children without parents. One of the latter was a little three- year-old named Lizzie Kregler, clad in a bright red dress. She’d been one of the lucky ones plucked from the paddle wheel box after the steamer beached. For four hours she sat in stunned silence in the station house until she suddenly perked up at the sight of a man searching among the dead.

  “Papa!” she called out.

  The voice at first startled the man, one Charles Kregler, but he quickly scanned the room and saw his youngest. He rushed to her and took her up in his arms, exclaiming, “My dear Lizzie, my dear Lizzie, how glad I am to find you.” With tears running down his face, he left with his daughter to search for her mother and three older siblings (he would find only a second daughter).

  By far the most remarkable piece of positive news at the police station involved fifteen-year-old Clara Hartman. She’d been found facedown in the water at North Brother Island and presumed dead. The small launch that found her was already filled with bodies, so the men simply towed her to shore. There a worker tagged her as body no. 24, wrapped her in a tarpaulin, and placed her with the dead. She was taken to the police station where, four hours later, a woman bent over her and unfolded the tarpaulin. She wanted to record a few identifying features of the young girl to assist in later identification. As she examined the girl, something made her pause. This body, she thought, somehow seems different from the others, but she couldn’t say why. The startling answer came a moment later when she undid the girl’s corset and detected breathing.

  “Be quick!” she shouted to several startled workers. “Hurry! This girl is alive!” Doctors rushed into the room and took measures to revive her. Gradually Clara’s breathing deepened. Presently she opened her eyes and within five minutes was fully conscious and able to speak a few faint words. It was one small miracle in an afternoon of unrelenting misery, and it left many workers at the station momenta
rily frozen in their tracks. A few sharp commands from one of the doctors and they jumped back to work, wrap ping the young girl in blankets and calling for an ambulance to take her to Lincoln Hospital. Just before she was carried out, one of the doctors took out his scissors and snipped off her body tag with the number 24 written on it.

  While thousands waited for admission to the police station, others headed for one or more of the several hospitals to which the injured were sent. “I have five children,” a distressed Frances Iden said to the policemen guarding the entrance to Lincoln Hospital, “the oldest nineteen, and the youngest five. They were all on the excursion. Let me pass.” They stepped aside and she bolted up the stairs and down the main corridor, pleading for someone to show her where the Slocum survivors were being held. She moved from ward to ward, carefully examining the occupants of each bed until finally she came upon a young girl almost completely covered in bandages. It was her twelve-year-old Anna. They recognized each other instantly and embraced in a tearful reunion. “I had five children this morning,” Mrs. Iden explained to the nurses gathered round them. “Now I only have this one.” As it turned out, Iden would later learn that one of her sons had survived without injury.

  Anna Iden was hardly the only young survivor waiting alone at Lincoln Hospital to discover the fate of their family. Eleven-year-old Dora Kregler had boarded the Slocum with her mother, brother, and two sisters (one sibling survived uninjured). Twelve-year-old Rose De Luccia, a member of an Italian immigrant family that attended the excursion, listened to the people around her sobbing in German and wondered what had become of her mother and three siblings (only her mother lived). Ten-year-old Frances Richter lay in her bed worrying about the fate of her mother and six siblings. All had been killed, and she was eventually found by her older brother, who did not go on the trip.

  Carl Kircher arrived to discover that his wife and two sons were alive and likely to recover. But his only daughter, Elsie, the only member of the family given a life preserver, was gone. Paul Port, the laundry owner, found his wife at Lincoln, but his two sons were missing. Frederick Zipse, accompanied by his son William, located his wife Sophia, but none of their five children who went on the trip (all had died). Conrad Muth found his brother John and nephew John, Jr., the only survivors of a group of fourteen.

  Amid these scenes of anxious waiting and searching, a few counted their blessings. As each distraught parent passed by her bed, Emma Firneisen realized just how lucky she was. She was burned, battered, and suffering from shock, but she and her three children had survived. Marie, age seven, and Henry, age ten, were in the hospital with her, while William was uninjured. In a nearby bed Mary Kneuster reflected on her good fortune. Her sons Charles, seventeen, and William, twelve, were with her at Lincoln Hospital, injured but alive. They perhaps more than most would feel the sharp prods of so-called “survivor’s guilt” in the months and years to come.

  Similar scenes unfolded at nearby Lebanon Hospital, where Anna Liebenow lay in a bed moaning under the pain of burns on the left side of her body. With her was Adella, her six-month-old baby who miraculously survived the ordeal. In a nearby bed was Annie Weber, her sister-in-law. Her burns were much more serious and included severe damage to her lungs. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the two women wondered if their husbands had found their missing children.

  Twelve-year-old Henry Oellrich waited until his father found him. He had no answer when his father asked of the fate of his mother and four siblings (none survived). Not seriously hurt, Catherine Gallagher waited for hours for word of her mother and two siblings. Toward 8:00 P.M., two women convinced her to go home and they accompanied her on the elevated train as far as East Fourteenth Street. From there the eleven-year-old ran home alone.

  Anna Frese, the fifteen-year-old aspiring concert pianist, was too badly burned to leave so quickly. When doctors looked at her scorched hands, they announced that amputation was necessary. Fortunately, Anna had her parents with her. Her father adamantly refused to let them amputate, and they left the hospital as soon they could. Anna’s piano-playing days were finished, but her hands eventually healed. Fourteen-year-old Martha Kutsch, all alone in the hospital, accepted the same diagnosis of the doctor who examined her crushed hand. It was amputated later that evening.

  And in a ward separate from the passengers lay the Slocum’s captain, William Van Schaick. A policeman stood nearby, a constant reminder that he was under arrest. Van Schaick writhed in pain from the burns he had suffered and the broken foot sustained when he jumped from the burning boat. But the mental anguish was nearly as bad. Over and over he replayed the frightful scenes in his mind. Incessantly the sounds of the ordeal—what he said were “the cries of people suffering from burning to death”—echoed in his head. And then there were the nagging doubts about his decisions— Full ahead into the wind? Make for North Brother Island instead of something closer? Never conduct a fire drill?

  For most, Harlem Hospital was the last stop before the journey downtown to the morgue. Located in Upper Manhattan, it was the farthest from the scene of the accident. Still, those who entered were not yet ready to give up. “In their faces,” wrote a journalist, “could be read the forlorn hope that still lingered, in spite of a tireless search of hospitals in the Bronx, that those whom they sought might possibly be in the Harlem institution.”

  All afternoon and into the evening they came, alone and in groups. Inside they joined the procession of searching relatives moving through the wards past countless bandaged survivors, many of them friends and neighbors. Most left disappointed but still hopeful. One large man fought to hold back his tears as he spoke with a doctor about his fruitless search for his wife and five children. “For four hours I have looked for a trace of them, but to no purpose. God is good, though, and I may yet find my darlings.”

  And off he went to the morgue, the place everyone dreaded most.

  HARVEST OF THE DEAD

  At around 3:00 P.M. the outgoing tide began to sweep away any hope of a death toll under two hundred and lay bare the stunning scope of the disaster. Scores of bodies began to appear as the waters receded. In just one hour, between 4:30 and 5:30 P.M., workers found fifty bodies. Over the next few hours the rate of what one reporter starkly termed the “harvest of the dead” soared to one body per minute. Even men accustomed to the grisly aftermath of murders and accidents, like Coroner O’Gorman, were shaken by the experience. “No one who stood on the beach Wednesday night,” remembered O’Gorman, “… will ever forget the scene. It is the kind of thing that a man will wake up nights and see again before him in the darkness.”

  The same terrible reality was dawning east of North Brother Island at the sunken wreck of the Slocum. As more and more of the vessel was exposed by the lowering tide, workmen from the Merritt Chapman salvage company began to recover dozens more victims. They also began to pull apart the paddle box and sections of the cabins. Soon the naval reserve launch Oneida pulled alongside the wreck bearing a team of four divers. They immediately donned their 175-pound armored suits and descended into the hull. There they saw scenes that made them shudder, and a few of them cry. Charles P. Everett, a veteran diver who six years earlier had explored the wreck of the U.S.S. Maine at the bottom of Havana harbor, gave a heartfelt account of what he saw on his first dive into the hull of the Slocum. The vessel was so completely destroyed, he said, had he not known what caused it to sink he would have guessed a huge explosion. “The appetite of the fire,” he reported, “must have been insatiable.” Once inside “the tomb,” as he called it, he saw scores of bodies trapped in the wreckage. “All [were] caught in that implacable, fatal grip supplied by the crunching together of beams and stanchions and wooden supports” when the decks collapsed. Most were women and children, many still clinging to each other in a final embrace. “They tell me I was down in the tomb about an hour and a half. That must be a mistake. I was down there a year.” A reporter from the Times noted that Everett “blanched as he described to us th
e horror.” The story was, the journalist agreed, “a tale to make strong men weep.”

  Within an hour Everett and his fellow divers managed to bring more than two hundred bodies to boats waiting at the surface. No one doubted anymore the early predictions of more than five hundred dead.

  Even before the official death toll began to surge, Coroner O’Gorman set in motion plans to establish a giant temporary morgue downtown on an enclosed pier owned by the Department of Charities and Corrections. The choice was a wise one as the pier, located at the end of East 26th Street, stood adjacent to the city’s official morgue. Better still, it was close to Little Germany.

  The morgue was a large brick building with an exuberant, Moorish look that belied its dismal purpose. On normal days it might contain the remains of as many as half a dozen persons, mostly criminals who died in prison, the impoverished too poor to afford a funeral, homeless people with no identification, or murder victims. Most were destined for burial in one of the city’s potter’s fields.

  Ever since the first telephone calls that morning had shattered the nor mally sleepy routine of the facility, the morgue staff had been working feverishly to prepare the Charities Pier for the arrival of hundreds of dead. They had an enormous and unprecedented task before them. The Charities Pier was ideal in terms of sheer space, for the massive covered pier was designed to operate like a temporary warehouse, protecting cargo from the elements as it came and went from boats. Assisted by dozens of city employees from agencies like the coroner’s office, the morgue staff established a viewing area where relatives could identify their loved ones, and a station where death certificates and body removal permits could be written up. They also ordered supplies—chiefly several tons of ice with which to preserve the bodies, and hundreds of coffins. The latter would prove difficult to obtain in such numbers, and eventually men were set to work knocking together pine-board coffins.