CANADA: Cruise of Death

Cleveland Druggist Sanford Newman and his wife had planned the cruise as their first real vacation in 15 years. They bought new clothes, left their two children at home and boarded the Canada Steamship Lines’ Noronic (6,905 tons), queen of the company’s Great Lakes fleet, for her last trip this year to the Thousand Islands. When the ship tied up at Toronto’s Pier 9 for an overnight stop, the Newmans went ashore for a movie, found the theaters jammed, came back to the ship to play gin rummy in the lounge. At 2:25 a.m. they smelled smoke, dropped their cards and rushed out to the corridor. Down its narrow length they saw crewmen fighting a blaze in an inside cabin on C deck.

Screaming “Fire! fire!”, Newman ran toward the gangplank with his wife and others from the lounge. From the pier, they looked back. Within minutes, the 36-year-old ship, encrusted with innumerable coats of paint that burned almost Rke magnesium, was lighting the sky with flames.

Over the Side. Sleeping off the effects of shipboard merrymaking, many of the 512 passengers—more than 80% of them Americans—never heard the cries of alarm. Some who did groggily dismissed them as the noise from another of the Noronic’s boisterous parties. Overwhelmed by the flash fire’s speed, the skeleton crew aboard the ship (30 out of 173) fought the fire for 13 minutes before sending an alarm to the Toronto Fire Department. Said one passenger later: “They might have been trying to put out hell with their fountain pens.”

Enough passengers heard the cries of fire to choke the Noronic’s three passen ger decks as frantic men & women fought to get to ropes and ladders dangling from the ship’s sides. Bashing through doors and portholes of the tiny staterooms, others got out—some naked or in flaming night clothes—to plunge headlong over the side and into the water or try a jump to the pier. There was time to lower only one lifeboat.

A water taxi headed for the Noronic and was soon filled with passengers pulling themselves out of the water or jumping from the first deck. Some landed on the roof of the cabin and broke through it. “There was blood all over the boat,” said the taxi’s pilot.

On the Bottom. Firemen stretched aerial ladders to the ship’s sides, played hoses on people burning alive at the rails. One man climbed down, moaning “No, no, no, no!” He fought police who tried to lead him away from the pier, shouted: “I’ve got seven people on that ship!” Another had a grisly blob stuck to his hands: he had tried to beat out the flames in a woman’s hair, had come away with part of her scalp.

It was not until after 7 a.m. that the Noronic’s* smoldering hulk, settled in mud 28 feet below the surface, could be boarded by firemen. The wooden superstructure was gone, steel deck plates were buckled. From twisted davits hung fire-scarred metal lifeboats, looking like flimsy toys that had been smashed by an angry child. In a knee-deep litter of embers and melted glass, the firemen went to work with blowtorches, pike poles and shovels, to get to the charred bodies of those who had been burned or asphyxiated or trampled to death.

In an emergency morgue set up in the horticulture hall at Toronto’s fair grounds, the known dead by week’s end totaled 120. Though 140 passengers were listed as missing, most of them had apparently escaped and left Toronto without reporting to anybody. Divers who searched the water-filled hold failed to find more bodies. Stunned officials of the Canada Steamship Lines had no idea—and doubted that they would ever find out—what had caused the worst ship fire in the line’s history. Best explanation: a smoldering cigarette which set fire to a mattress in the C-deck stateroom.

* An ill-fated name. In February 1893, the White Star steamer Noronic (6,000 tons) disappeared without trace on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York.