Shut Up And Mind Your Own Business!: New York's General Slocum Disaster

By Robert Laurence

It was to be a grand day - the annual St. Mark's Sunday school picnic aboard the General Slocum excursion steamer.

As the crammed boat puffed up the rippling waters of New York City's East River on June 15, 1904, more than a thousand passengers, mostly women and children, basked contentedly in the bright sun.

A slight breeze wafted a smoke trail downstream as the sleek paddlewheel steamer, the biggest and fas**** in New York waters, headed for Hell Gate and Long Island Sound.

Below decks, a 14-year-old boy ran from his playmates in an impromptu game of hide-and-seek.
"You won"t find me!" he shouted. "You won"t find me till we get to Long Island!"

The boy's friends didn"t find him. Soon they gave up and turned to other games.

Still, the youngster wandered aimlessly below deck, unaware that the game was over.

Ironically, he would be one of the few to survive the impending disaster, for he was the first to notice the flames creeping upward.

He saw them and felt their heat as he rounded a corner in the darkness. As the flames sprang out at him he jumped back and raced upstairs toward the pilothouse.

"FIRE!" he shouted. "A fire in the storeroom!"

But the first mate sounded no alarm. 'shut up and mind your own business!" he told the boy. He did follow the youngster, who ran far in front of him. After gaping and cursing at the flames, he still failed to sound an alarm. Finally he advised Captain William H. Van Shaick..

The Slocum's skipper went below to investigate. Flames were leaping upward.

PERHAPS HE SHOULD FLOOD THE STOREROOM . . . A LAW REQUIRED THAT THERE BE A STEAM-VALVE . . . SOMEWHERE . . . FOR JUST THAT PURPOSE . . . STILL . . . THERE WAS NO STEAM-VALVE!"

The captain stood transfixed. Before he thought of sounding an alarm the Slocum had traveled 27 blocks up the East River.

But his deadly blundering had just begun. Instead of beaching the Slocum, which was by now a pyre of flames, he swung her into deep water and up the narrow channel.
With the steamer now running into the wind, flames began to consume her lower deck.

The crew panicked.

Although maritime laws required mock exercises at least once a week, the Slocum's crew had never had a fire drill, had never put water through a fire hose, had never lowered a boat. Not one of them was a seaman.

When they finally rigged one hose, water pressure burst the rotted linen apart in three places.

The Slocum had been sighted now and a fleet of tugs rattled toward her, straining for a chance to help. But the frightened crew of the steamer abandoned all responsibility. Most broke ranks and jumped overboard.

Death now captained the ship.

A child shimmied to the top of the Slocum's flaming flagpole, falling into the fire when the pole snapped in two. A baby was born into the inferno and quickly died gasping for air, not milk, from his mother's breast. Men cursed Van Shaick, later found guilty of many infractions before this.

One father who had lost his child fired a revolver at the Captain, narrowly missing him.

The flames spread. Screaming women and children found their clothes aflame.

The whole lower deck became panic-stricken when three little girls, their party dresses burning, leaped over the rail and floated by.

There was no one to offer help. None of the crew tried to launch a single lifeboat.

The 10 life rafts aboard were wired to the deck and passengers struggled to get them loose.

Nine-tenths of the life preservers were 13 years old, instead of the prescribed maximum of seven years
They split in pieces as children tried to break the wires holding them.

When passengers did manage to launch one lifeboat, a fear-stricken deck hand leaped into it and it capsized.

The panic intensified when a rail on the upper deck gave way.

Hundreds of women and children plunged into the water, clutching the flaming rail.

Those who weren"t killed by the fall clung to defective life belts and tried to swim through the tangled bodies to safety.

Above them a giant burst of flames enveloped all three decks on the Slocum, rising 30 feet higher than the smokestack.

Children, on fire and screaming for their mothers, stumbled blindly into more flames.

Women who could not swim threw their children overboard and leaped in trying to save them.
Others huddled on the flaming deck as the fire ate its way toward them.

The ship traveled another mile before the captain finally beached her on North Brother Island - three miles from where the fire was first reported.

But Captain Van Shaick ran the Slocum straight in, choosing the worst possible landing position.
Flames separated the passengers from shore while deep water at the sides and stern lapped around the blazing hull.

Had she been beached broadside, many passengers could have been saved.

At least 1031 people, mostly children, died that horrible morning.

"We couldn"t budge a thing on board," a bitter survivor told the coronor's jury.

"I had to jump overboard without a life preserver."
"I tried to pull down three life rings," another survivor ****ified, "but on each one the cork splattered in my face."
It was proved that a New York Harbor inspector had neglected to report seven barrels packed with hay, which were in the storeroom, although hay was prohibited by law aboard excursion steamers.

The jury was told that the storeroom door had been open because "the crew liked to hang their wet laundry in the warmest place on the boat."

President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a commission which discovered that an inspection had never been made of 268 vessels in New York Harbor.

They also learned that a third of these vessels had defective life preservers, that a quarter had defective hoses and that not one vessel complied fully with the law, despite the fact that every ship had a certificate of inspection signed by New York officials.

Captain Van Shaick was sentenced to ten years in prison for his part in the sordid affair.

The almost incredible negligence, which can only be touched upon here, made the General Slocum holocaust America's worst peacetime ship disaster and one of the worst of all maritime catastrophies, rivaling even the Titanic sinking.
 

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