CATASTROPHE: Inferno Afloat

At the entrance to Havana Harbor stands a grey 300-year-old fortress called Morro Castle. On the sandy beach at Asbury Park, N. J. last week lay the smoking, fire-gutted, heat-wracked cadaver of a liner named after the fortress. Between Morro Castle and Asbury Park the Morro Castle passed through a maritime horror unequalled since the Vestris went down off the Virginia Capes (TIME, Nov. 26, 1928).

Wednesday evening the twin-screw turbo-electric liner Morro Castle, 11,500 tons, lay at her Ward Line pier in Havana. In her hold was a cargo of 750 tons of perishable fruit. She was manned by a crew of 240. And up her gangway, in little groups chattering about their Cuban purchases, trooped 318 passengers. Most of them were U. S. vacationists on a week’s southern cruise and few of them were distinguished persons. The Morro Castle was warped into the roadstead, stood out of the harbor, bound for New York, three days away.

The barometer began to fall off the Florida Keys. On the second day a heavy sea was running. By the next evening the Morro Castle was riding a gale off the Capes.

No Caribbean tramp was T. E. L. Morro Castle. The last word in mechanical modernity, her propulsion was of the most expensive sort: oil-burning boilers drove steam turbines to power the motors which turned her screws. She was built at Newport News, Va. in 1930 for $5,500.000. Against fire she was protected by one of the most elaborate systems ever installed afloat. In a special fire-control room was a switchboard, supposed to be manned day & night, with tubes which permitted the operator to pipe fire-extinguishing gas to any threatened part of the ship. An automatic alarm system was designed to indicate instantly the position of fire in any part of the vessel.

Though the Morro Castle was smaller than most transatlantic liners, her 21-knot speed and sumptuous appointments put her in the deluxe class on the New York-Havana run. Her master, Robert R. Willmott, 31 years in service, was Commodore of the Ward Line fleet.

Night of the farewell cruise dinner, Capt. Willmott was not there to play host. Day before, complaining of a stomach ache, he had retired to his cabin. In the dining saloon paper hats bobbed merrily, poppers crackled amid the small extravagances of last-night wine. But Capt. Willmott lay dead, half in, half out of his cabin bath tub, dead, said the ship’s doctor, of “acute indigestion and heart attack.”

Chief Officer William F. Warms wirelessed his owners in New York: “Willmott deceased 7:45 p. m.” The Ward Line radioed back for confirmation, received it from the purser. The farewell dance was canceled. Heavyhearted. Chief Officer Warms, now acting captain, began pacing his bridge. A fog closed in.

An Astoria. L. I. stenographer named Una Cullen was sitting with another girl and two men in the lounge just before 3 a. m. For most of the ship’s company it had been a dreary evening. They had sat in depressed groups after dinner, gone below later to pack while stewards and stewardesses whisked up & down the corridors comforting two-thirds of the passenger list which were deathly seasick. But Miss Cullen and her friends were bound to make a night of it. stay up and see the dawn over New York Harbor. They never saw it, for suddenly a cloud of smoke began to pour from the library. Some seamen were slopping buckets of water on a blaze. They told Miss Cullen and her friends: “Don’t worry! It will be put out easy.” Miss Cullen ran down to wake up her roommate and get a coat.

Without rhyme or reason the whole midships suddenly seemed to sprout fire. In his cabin on the hurricane deck, First Assistant Radio Officer George I. Alagna was awakened by a heavy trampling of feet. He noticed that it was 2:56 in the morning. Alagna heard someone scream: “We can’t control the fire! The pressure’s gone!” Then he awakened his chief, pudgy George W. Rogers, who went to the wireless room and took over from the second assistant. The room went dark as the ship’s electric power failed. With a flashlight the radio men turned on the reserve battery current. “Sparks” Rogers then sent out his station call, KGVO. He next sent his QRT “Clear the air!” Then CQ “Attention, please!” Then “All stations please stand by!” Meanwhile the operator in a little stucco Radio Marine Station at Tuckerton, N. J. had relayed a query from a ship in the Morro Castle’s neighborhood: “Was a nearby ship afire?” A pillar of flame could be seen. But it was not until 3:25 that Alagna could fight his way back through the flames with authority from Captain Warms, desperate on the bridge, to send out the dread SOS. “Di-di-di-da-da-da-di-di-di! The flames are under the radio room. KGYO. KGYO 20 miles south of Scotland Light . . . SOS. SOS, Di-di-di-da-da-da-di-di-di. . . . Can’t hold out much longer. . . .” Blind, almost knocked out by the bitter smoke. “Sparks” Rogers and Alagna stumbled out of the wireless room. By that time the Morro Castle was an inferno from stem to stern.

The fire must have been raging half an hour before anyone down in the engineering force knew anything about it. At about 3 o’clock the bridge signalled the engine room to stand by. A few minutes later came an order to search the engine room for signs of fire. At 3:10 full speed ahead on the starboard engine was ordered. The steering gear had burned away and Captain Warms wanted to swing the Morro Castle around for a swing toward the shore. At 3 :30 came the order to stop the engines. Engineers groped through smoke and darkness to reach the valves and controls to shut off the big boilers.

Pandemonium broke loose below decks after the shutoff. Men fought like beasts to get out of the hold. Three times Oiler Antonio Georgia started up the narrow stairs and three times his legs were caught and he was dragged down.

Soon after the fire alarm had sounded. the port side of the ship was like the inside of a Bessemer converter. Astern, cut off from ship’s officers by the fire, frightened passengers in night clothes prayed, shrieked, sang “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” A young Catholic priest walked calmly around giving all comers final absolution. Eight of the ship’s twelve boats were lowered. There was fighting to get into these. “Everybody was pushing and screaming topside.” said Seaman Carl Jackson. “The passengers were fighting to get to the lifeboats, but it was no good. They were on fire. I fought and got into a boat. Three women got into the boat, too. The air was so full of smoke it hurt.”

Less brutal was the conduct of slangy Able Seaman Jerry Edgerton: “I kept thinking about that poem ‘The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck.’ Finally my bunk pals shook me out of it and we decided to go overboard. A couple of girls came up and asked—polite but excited—if we’d mind their going along with us. I said. ‘Sure, help yourself to the Atlantic and jump in.’ When we were in the water I don’t know what happened to one of the girls but when the other seemed about ready to give up I said. ‘Come on. girlie, it’s only a short walk.’ Then a lifeboat picked us up.”

Gouverneur Morris Phelps Jr., son of a well-known Manhattan physician, stood at the rail with his father and stepmother. Plainly visible were the shore lights across the stormy waters. Dr. Phelps turned to his wife and said: “Katharine, that light over there must be Scotland Lisht and that one over there must be Ambrose. That means that the beach over there must be less than seven miles away. I think, dear, our one chance is to go over and try to make the beach on our own. Will you come?” Mrs. Phelps smiled through her tears and nodded. Then Dr. Phelps turned to his son and said: “Govvie, I have all I can do to take care of Katharine. You’re a man now. You can take care of yourself. Don’t wait too long. . . . Good luck!” And Dr. Phelps lifted Mrs. Phelps over the rail, dropped her into the water and went in after her.

All the Phelpses were saved. “Govvie” jumped off the stern, found a dangling rope, clung to it for six hours. Said he afterward: “I had to watch women I’d met and danced with drop off one by one and hear their desperate and familiar voices pleading. Finally there was a perfect rain of people. A hundred or more came leaping over the side to escape a sudden burst of flames. They hit one another in the descent. Many sank like stones.”

At dawn the blazing Morro Castle was surrounded by rescue ships, the great three-funnelled Monarch of Bermuda, the coastwise steamer City of Savannah and the freighter Andrea F. Luckenbach, one of whose officers in a small boat grabbed young Phelps, dragged him to safety. Contorted faces appeared at cabin portholes, trapped, staring out from the red-hot plates. Some cursed and raved. In his own little private hell, one man seemed to smile and wave his hand in farewell.

All day long Coast Guardsmen, fishermen and Jersey boatmen plied the choppy seas, trying to distinguish between the floating bodies of the dead and the floating bodies of the living. The former were left to wash ashore with the tide.

A noted rescuer was Governor Arthur Harry Moore of New Jersey. Awakening at his summer home in Sea Girt, he found a major disaster had occurred in his State’s front yard. He hopped out of bed, piled into a National Guard plane, went roaring seaward. Leaning as far out of his cockpit as his safety belt allowed, he scanned the grey waters for survivors, waved a red flag at boatmen whenever he saw a bobbing head.

Meanwhile the fiery Morro Castle had staged a last sensation. With twelve officers and men, Captain Warms finally abandoned ship and his helpless, wallowing vessel, pounded by heavy seas, lurched broadside on Asbury Park Beach late Saturday afternoon. Grounded 15 ft. deep in sand, the ship swung her stern within 50 yd. of the resort’s convention hall. There she lay for days, a fiery hull, emitting smoke and sparks, while countless thousands stood on the beach and gawped.

Working fast but carefully, the Ward Line compiled these statistics: Of the 550 passengers and crew, 137 were dead or missing. Of the 102 bodies recovered, five remained unidentified.

As usual in all great marine catastrophes, Lloyd’s of London will have to pay the Ward Line some $3,000,000 in insurance while smaller underwriters who share the loss make up the balance. But who was to share the blame for the 137 dead and lost?

Because most of the people who got away from the Morro Castle in her own boats turned out to be members of the crew, explanations seemed in order. According to some lifeboatmen, a “mysterious outward draft of air” seemed to surround the blazing vessel, blowing them back when they tried to row in for survivors, so that one lifeboat with a capacity of 70 reached shore containing four. Other seamen explained that many of the passen gers were too seasick to make the effort to escape. Still others said that “too much modesty” sent night-gowned women back to their cabins.

Inquiry by the U. S. Bureau of Steam boat Inspection was not long coming. The lines from his eyes cut clear down to his drooping mouth, Captain Warms told Assistant Director Dickerson N. Hoover that the Morro Castle’s automatic fire alarm system had failed to work. Fire bulkheads, he testified, were not closed: passengers would have been trapped. He believed that the crew did its best to get passengers to lifeboats, were unable to save only those who were “trapped” and “six or seven women drunk in their state rooms.” He had no first hand information about the fire’s origin, but suspected from what an officer had reported to him that “the fire was set by someone.” A locker in the ship’s writing room mysteriously “blew out as if it were fed by gasoline or kero sene.” The officer whom Acting Captain Warms sent to investigate testified the fire “rushed out of the closet. … It looked like it was set on fire.” The officer .on watch suggested: “Maybe some mental de fective set the fire to see how much fun it would cause.” Other witnesses likewise thought the fire was deliberate because it seemed to break out in several places at once, burn so fiercely.

While the suspicion of incendiarism was making big black headlines, the chief of the Havana Port Police advanced this idea: “The Morro Castle fire seems to have been the work of Communists, ap parently of a passenger who boarded the ship with firemaking chemicals in his ]baggage.”

Meanwhile the Santa Rita of the Grace Line, bound north from Valparaiso, Chile, limped into Balboa, Canal Zone, with a suspicious fire in her hold. Said some of her officers: “The fire here and also that on the Morro Castle were the work of an international radical organization.”