Transport: Air, Land & Sea

In Belgium, France, on Chesapeake Bay and on the Caribbean Sea last week, St. Christopher, patron of travelers, nodded and Death came to nearly threescore people journeying by air, land & sea.

¶ An hour after leaving Baltimore on an overnight run to Norfolk, the 297-ft. steamship City of Baltimore was rounding the mouth of the Patapsco River when fishermen in the bay nearby saw what they thought was a great ball of fire ascending from the deck. Fire had broken out in the hold or engine room. Police boats, Coast Guard craft and private speedboats swarmed to the rescue while the City of Baltimore burned almost to the waterline. Although the scene was reminiscent of the Morro Castle, the casualty list was small —three dead, two missing at week’s end. This was the first loss of passenger life at sea by fire or collision on U. S. vessels since the safety campaign which got under way two years ago after the Ward Line disasters (TIME, Feb. 4, 1935). The City of Baltimore’s Captain Charles O. Brooks said he suspected sabotage, because his brother, skipper on another line, had been “threatened” by “C. I. O. organizers.”

¶ In Paris, an express train bound for St. Etienne pulled out 15 min. late, bearing scores of vacationing schoolchildren and pilgrims returning to southern France from Lisieux. Nine miles south of the capital, the locomotive leaped off the track, dragging the forward coaches with it. Twenty-five dead and 50 injured were taken from the jumbled mass of wreckage. Railway officials ascribed the wreck to an “error in switching.”

¶ In Brussels, a big Douglas transport of the Royal Dutch Air Lines (KLM) took off on a morning run from Amsterdam to Paris. Some witnesses thought the motors sounded queer. On board were a crew of three and twelve passengers, including Benjamin F. Mun of Long Beach, Calif., president of Humber Oil Co. Near the village of Lembecq-lez-Hal the airliner bored into a mass of dark cloud, was seen few minutes later pitching steeply to earth with flame enveloping the left wing. The plane struck so hard that the motors and half the fuselage disappeared into the ground. All on board were killed. KLM officials, but few other aeronautical experts, thought that lightning might have ignited the fuel tanks while the airliner was in the cloud.

¶ A new Sikorsky 543 transport of Pan-American-Grace Airways, carrying n passengers and crew of three from Santiago, Chile, radioed it was circling in a rainstorm over the field at Cristobal, C. Z., where it was scheduled to transfer its passengers to a northbound Pan-American Clipper. No more was heard from the Sikorsky. Next day its wreckage was found 20 mi. west of Cristobal, all on board presumably lost.