Ship Ablaze

by Ed O'Donnell

  “As for life preservers bought for the Slocum.”

  “Did all these preservers go to the Slocum?”

  “No, but our books will show how many went there and how many went to the Grand Republic.”

  “These bills show all the purchases of life preservers since 1902. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you give us the accounts showing the purchases of life preservers for the Slocum since 1891?”

  “I don’t know. The books, except for the past three years, are in storage in Brooklyn. We will try to get them if they are needed. I believe they are there, but usually we do not keep books except for a season’s business.”

  Garvan paused to let Barnaby’s words register fully with the jury before hitting him with a stinging shot. “Is it customary for a large concern to destroy its books?”

  “I don’t know” was Barnaby’s mumbled reply.

  Garvan posed a few more questions, but satisfied that he had seriously damaged Barnaby’s credibility, let the witness step down.

  James Atkinson, secretary and general manager of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, next took the stand. When asked about the matter of life preservers aboard the Slocum, Atkinson denied knowledge of equipment purchases, company records, or erasures made on bills. “I can’t tell anything about it,” he explained. “I got the bills from the bookkeeper and handed them to Mr. Barnaby.”

  When Atkinson divulged that the company had but one bookkeeper, a Miss S. C. Hall, Garvan turned to the crowd and asked if she was present. Atkinson explained that she was downtown minding the company office.

  “Well, Mr. Atkinson,” said Garvan testily to a man twice his age, “you go downtown and keep the office, and let Miss Hall come up here and tell us something about those bills. And tell her to bring all the company books.”

  As Atkinson slunk off the stand, Berry announced a one-hour recess for lunch.

  It was not yet 12 noon on the first morning of the inquest, and already he and Garvan sensed victory. They plainly had Barnaby and company on the run. Grilling the crew, they anticipated, would only add to their case.

  The afternoon session began with a start as Captain Van Schaick was called to the witness stand. As the jury and spectators looked for the man whose picture they’d seen day after day in the papers, word was sent to Berry that the captain remained in the hospital, too weak as yet to testify. He might be available later in the week.

  Berry then returned to the witness list and called up the first of four of Slocum’s crewmen. John Coakley, the deckhand who first learned of the fire, took his seat on the witness stand. Clearly nervous and unused to wearing a suit and tie, he removed his coat and folded it across his knee. Garvan wasted no time in establishing several key points.

  “Were you ever present at a fire drill on board the Slocum at any time?” asked Garvan.

  “I never was.”

  “Were you ever instructed as to what to do in case of a fire?”

  “Never.”

  “How long have you been on the Slocum?”

  “Eighteen days at the time of the accident.”

  When asked what his duties were aboard the boat, Coakley replied that he was “to keep the children from climbing where they should not be.” Asked what he was doing when informed of the fire, Coakley replied that he was drinking a beer.

  He then went on, at Garvan’s prodding, to explain how he tried unsuccessfully to put out the fire himself and then notified First Mate Flanagan. After the hose burst, he continued, he ran to warn passengers and distribute life preservers. Then, he asserted, “I lowered one of the lifeboats.”

  “What’s that?” interjected Garvan, with an incredulous look on his face. By the time of the inquest it was widely known that none of the Slocum’s lifeboats had been launched. “Do you mean to say that you lowered a lifeboat?”

  “Yes,” answered Coakley.

  Garvan fired several more follow-ups regarding Coakley’s patently false claim about the lifeboat, but the deckhand stood by his statement.

  Berry then took over and moved on to ask about the lamp room where the fire began. When asked about its contents, Coakley ticked off a list of highly flammable items, including lamp oil, lubricants, wood, charcoal, oily rags, and on June 15 barrels full of hay—each one prohibited by federal law pertaining to steamboats.

  “Did you ever light matches when you went down where the oil was in the forward cabin?”

  “Why sure, if I wanted to see,” answered Coakley.

  “Did the rest of the crew do the same?”

  “Sure they did.”

  Satisfied that the deckhand had provided ample evidence in favor of the prosecution, Berry dismissed Coakley, who was immediately returned to the house of detention.

  More damning testimony followed. Deckhand Tom Collins explained that he too never saw a fire drill aboard the Slocum. He flatly contradicted Coakley’s assertion that any lifeboats had been launched. Second Mate James Corcoran corroborated Collins’s statements, but admitted further that part of the problem with getting the fire hose to work properly may have resulted from his failure to remove a solid rubber stopper, or flange, from the standpipe before attaching the hose.

  “The fire hose would be useless with that rubber flange in there?” asked Garvan.

  “Yes, sir,” answered Corcoran.

  “Was this rubber flange taken out when this fire started?” the district attorney pressed.

  “I don’t know,” came the somewhat sheepish reply.

  “You didn’t take it out?” Garvan demanded incredulously.

  “No, to tell the truth, the rubber stopper was not taken out at all.”

  Garvan and Berry were having a field day with the witnesses, but they’d saved the best for last. Late in the afternoon the Slocum’s first mate, Edward Flanagan, took his place in the witness chair. Peppered from the outset with questions about the contents of the lamp room, the rubber stopper in the standpipe, and the effort to extinguish the blaze, Flanagan answered repeatedly that he did not remember. Frustrated, Garvan asked him caustically what had happened to his memory.

  “Well, if you went through what I did,” he replied in a distressed voice, “your memory might be bad, too. I can’t sleep nights. I imagine I see the whole thing before me—”

  But Garvan would have none of it and he cut him off and resumed his questioning. Because of Flanagan’s senior position on the boat, the district attorney was particularly keen on exploring the issue of the life preservers and Lundberg’s inspection on May 5.

  “Were there any new life preservers on board the boat this year?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What kind were in the racks?”

  “They were all good, I guess. Some of them might have been bad.”

  “Were you present when the inspection was made?”

  “I didn’t go round the boat with the inspectors.”

  “Did you see them inspect the life preservers?”

  “Well, the inspector went around and he had a stick in his hand. He poked some of the life preservers in the racks. He ordered me to take down about twenty or maybe ten.”

  “Then all he did was to poke the life preservers with a stick?”

  “That’s all I remember.”

  “You had charge of putting up the preservers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were there any new ones?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Did they inspect the fire hose?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Now, isn’t it a fact that you saw no life preservers on that boat except those which were stamped ‘passed Sept. 28, 1891’?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Coroner Berry then jumped in: “Isn’t it a fact, that when the inspectors were on board you took twenty new preservers and put them on a bench and led the inspector to them and told him they were all like that and he passed them?”

  “I can’t rem
ember that.”

  Flanagan, visibly wilting under the pressure being applied by Garvan and Berry, had only a moment to catch his breath when Assistant U.S. District Attorney Henry Wise stood and was recognized by the coroner. Did Flanagan, he asked, possess a license, as required by law, to serve as first mate aboard the Slocum. No, he replied reluctantly, he’d never bothered to get one.

  When the first day of the inquest came to a close a few minutes later, Garvan and Berry were elated. It had seemed almost too easy, as witness after witness made damaging statements about the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company and their own performance during the disaster. Perhaps the most striking was the number of times they made statements that contradicted each other and their own earlier versions of events. To Garvan, Berry, and the press, these inconsistencies highlighted the degree to which many of the witnesses, doubtless at Barnaby’s instigation, were lying. “As is usual in the case of men instructed to tell untruths,” observed the Times, “they are becoming involved in a tangle of contradictions.”

  Little that transpired the next day did much to undermine this perception. Several more crewmen were interviewed, but the most notable testimony came from Miss S. C. Hall, the bookkeeper for the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. The thin, frail-looking woman arrived with the company’s books dating back to 1902, the rest having been destroyed, she explained. Under relentless questioning from the district attorney she admitted to using acid to change the name Grand Republic on the bills for life preservers to General Slocum, but insisted she had done so prior to the fire. “It was my custom to use acid,” she explained, but when pressed she could offer no clear explanation as to why she’d changed the life preserver bills.

  “Is it not a fact,” he asked sharply, “that not one life preserver has been bought for the Slocum or put on board her since 1895? Don’t your books show that?”

  “The books only show what occurred since 1902.”

  “I want an answer from you, Miss Hall,” Garvan roared. “Do your books show the purchase of any life preservers for the Slocum since 1902?”

  “I can’t find any entries,” Hall answered, as she made a halfhearted shuffle through her books.

  Garvan asked that the books be put in evidence. This brought Terence McManus, lawyer for the company, to his feet in protest. Garvan glared at him and asked mockingly why he objected to so routine a request. “Are there any hideous secrets concealed in them?” McManus backed down and Garvan resumed his questioning of the bookkeeper.

  “Now, you say that you know there were no life preservers bought for the Slocum since 1902. Explain to me then why you changed these bills to make them appear as if the purchases of these preservers were for the Slocum,” Garvan demanded.

  Cornered, Hall grew incoherent, unable to complete a sentence.

  “Who told you to get out the bills for the life preservers?” asked Coroner Berry.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Now, there are only two persons who could give you that order—the president or Mr. Atkinson. Do you mean to say you can’t remember who ordered them?”

  “I cannot,” Hall responded.

  “Why did you choose the life preserver bills and not those for other supplies?” the coroner wondered.

  “I don’t know. I thought they might be wanted.”

  Berry told Hall to step down and immediately head for the company office to retrieve all relevant books and documents. To ensure her speedy return, he sent a policeman to accompany her. As she left the makeshift courtroom, two representatives of the Kahnweiler & Sons life preserver company took the stand and stated unequivocally that no new life preservers had been delivered to the Slocum since 1895, and possibly as far back as 1891, the year the vessel was launched. But when one of the witnesses, Otto Kahnweiler, insisted that one of his “Never-Sink” preservers lasted twenty years if properly cared for, Garvan seized upon the occasion to make a dramatic point to the jury. When the district attorney placed a decrepit life preserver in his lap, Kahnweiler responded, “I’ll trust myself to that belt now with hands and feet tied.” Garvan gave a tug on the straps, tearing them off effortlessly. As cork dust poured onto Kahnweiler’s feet, Garvan turned to Berry and said, “That will do.”

  Pilot Ed Weaver led off the afternoon session and produced a great deal of consternation when he defended Captain Van Schaick’s decision to beach the boat on North Brother Island. “Did you not tell me on Sunday,” asked Berry, referring to the trip aboard the police boat over the course taken by the Slocum, “that if it had been left to you the Slocum would have been beached at 129th Street?”

  “I did not,” retorted Weaver, in spite of the fact that all the major dailies had published accounts of his statement criticizing Van Schaick’s decision.

  The biggest sensation of the day came in the middle of the afternoon when Inspector Harry Lundberg was called to testify. The burly thirty-eight year-old invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer any questions.

  Turning to the jury and gallery, Garvan made clear his outrage. “This is one of the most remarkable spectacles that I have ever witnessed. An officer of the United States Government taking any such stand is unparalleled.”

  On Wednesday, the third day of the inquest, Garvan and Berry continued to build their case against Barnaby and the company. Reverend George Schultze, the minister from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had attended the Slocum excursion as the guest of Reverend Haas, testified that the crew made no effort to help the passengers and that all the life preservers he found were rotten. Ben Conklin, the Slocum’s chief engineer since she was launched in 1891, said he’d never seen a fire drill aboard the boat. Captain John A. Pease, captain of the Grand Republic and commodore of the Knickerbocker fleet in charge of keeping the boats in full working order, said the Slocum’s life preservers “looked all right” to him but he’d never actually examined them. Nor had he, contrary to testimony by others earlier, bought any fire hose for the Slocum.

  But the key moment for the prosecution came when Miss Hall was recalled to the stand. Garvan had declared earlier for the benefit of the jury that he could prove that no new life preservers had been purchased for the Slocum since 1895. The answers elicited from Miss Hall in the next few minutes would indicate whether or not he could deliver on that promise.

  Garvan’s confidence, already high, rose still higher even before Miss Hall opened her mouth. For he could plainly see that despite her announced intention the previous day to locate company books and documents that would corroborate her version of events related to the altered bills, she took the stand empty-handed. No, she answered, sheepishly, she had no evidence. Nor did she, upon further questioning, have any bookkeeping system at all.

  With Miss Hall on the ropes regarding the altered bills for new life preservers and the possibility looming that she might divulge the fact that Barnaby had ordered her to doctor the books, Terence McManus, counsel to the Knickerbocker Company, rose from his seat. All eyes turned in his direction at the sound of his chair scraping the floor. “In order not to prolong this investigation,” the veteran lawyer said, “my clients will concede that no new life preservers have been put on board the General Slocum since 1895.” Before these words had time to fully register with his astonished audience, McManus proceeded to outline the company’s new legal strategy. Having failed at outright fraud and deceit, it would now hide behind the USSIS’s sham inspection system. “We did not believe that any [life preservers] were needed, and relied entirely on the inspection made by federal authorities that everything on the boat was in first-class condition.”

  Garvan smiled and said he was pleased by the admission, “as we would have proved the fact, if we have not already done so.” In fact, officers from his office had gone aboard the Grand Republic the day before, he explained, and found all of the 350 life preservers referred to in the altered bills as having been sent to the Slocum.

  “Yes, and stole the logbook,” sputtered an indign
ant Dittenhoeffer, leaping to his feet. “You stole the log, and have not returned it. That’s an indictable offense, I’ll have you know.”

  To Dittenhoeffer’s petulant rant, Garvan responded only with a taunting grin that said—case closed.

  The next day, Thursday, June 23, came off as “hero day” at the inquest, as one daily put it. North Brother Island heroines Lulu McGibbon and Mary McCann told their stories to a rapt audience, as did tugboat captain Jack Wade. The latter had particularly harsh words for Flanagan and the Slocum’s crew, but firmly upheld the decision of Van Schaick to beach the boat on North Brother Island. “He couldn’t have done any better,” said Wade in his endearingly blunt manner. This assertion was later challenged by another veteran pilot, Capt. John Van Gilder, who insisted that Van Schaick should have landed the Slocum at 131st Street. Van Schaick himself made a dramatic entrance into the armory on a stretcher, but after con sulting with medical personnel and the captain’s lawyer, Berry declined to have him questioned and sent him back to Lebanon Hospital.

  Several survivors also took the stand, including Paul Liebenow, who showed the jury his badly cut hands—injuries resulting, he explained, from his effort to free life preservers from the wire mesh that held them in place.

  At 5:00 P.M., Berry announced the day’s proceedings closed and that no further hearings would take place until Monday, June 27, four days hence. Neither Garvan nor Berry offered an explanation for suspending the hearings, but the truth was that it came at the behest of the jury. They had seen and heard enough, the foreman explained, to render a verdict. Having examined only a fraction of the more than two hundred witnesses subpoenaed, Berry and Garvan decided to temporarily suspend rather than formally end the inquest. This would allow for the gathering of additional evidence and perhaps even testimony by Van Schaick.

  Nonetheless, a sense of finality permeated the air as the evening papers hit the newsstands. The people of New York read not only of the inquest’s suspension but also that the Slocum had been refloated, the Charities Pier closed, and Cortelyou’s federal commission formed. On Friday the U.S. assistant district attorney announced the formation of a grand jury, and on Saturday the police department released its updated list predicting a death toll of 1,031. On Sunday, Pastor Haas summoned all his strength and preached for the first time since the fire. On Monday the coroner’s jury, instead of hearing testimony at the armory, took a tour of the Slocum wreck to see the evidence firsthand. On Tuesday morning all the papers predicted that the jury would render its verdict by day’s end.