History of the General Slocum disaster by which nearly 1200 lives were lost by the burning of the steamer General Slocum in Hell gate, New York harbor, June 15,1904.

Front matter

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Preface

In presenting a brief history of one of the greatest calamities of modern times, by which nearly twelve hundred persons were burned to death and drowned in New York Harbor, we have necessarily had to depend upon different writers and upon many sources of information for the facts contained in this book, but we have taken the greatest possible care that all statements made are as nearly the actual truth as possible, and we give them to the public, believing, as we do, that many persons will be glad to have, as a matter of reference, the facts condensed together in one volume.

The Compiler.

HISTORY

OF THE

GENERAL SLOCUM DISASTER

Chapter I

Nothing approaching the recent General Slocnm disaster has happened in New York waters before. The exact number of the women and children who were burned to death and drowned by the burning of the pleasure steamer General Slocum will not be far from twelve hundred.

Nearly all of those who were burned and drowned were women and little children, members of the Sunday School of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, in Sixth street, who were on their annual excursion.

Between 1,400 and 1,500 people, so far as can be learned, started out on the Slocum. Nearly a third of them were babies. Try as best they could, the police and hospital authorities and the officers of the church could not find more than 300 or 400 survivors. But everybody believed that, when matters were straightened out, and all the hospitals began to give an accounting of the wounded they had taken in spontaneously, the list of those members of the excursion still living would be most happily lengthened. Many of the excursionists were children not attached to the church.

6 THE GENERAL SLOCUM DISASTEE.

HOW COULD IT HAPPEN?

'^ow did such a thing happen?'^ That was the qnestion which was reiterated up and down the length and breadth of the city. People read of the captain who foniid at 110th street that his boat, with its precious cargo, was on lire and yet did not drive it to the shore until he was beyond 138th street, a mile and a half from the place where the cry of "Fire!" first reached his ears.

Captain William H. Van Schaick of the Slocum explained, as best he could, how such horrible disaster had come to a company under his care and direction. He is a man 61 years old, and has had long experience in commanding pleasure craft in the waters around New York. Captain Van Schaick said that though he heard the alarm of fire early, he made up his mind at once that there was no certain place where she could be beached in shallow water st)uth of North Brother Island. The tide was running up to the Sound with terrific velocity, and he was sure that he would lose time trying to turn his boat into a proper beaching place south of North Brother Island. He stuck to his post, although the flames scorched his clothing, until the boat was hard and fast ashore. Pilot Van Wart stayed with him.

Eivermen generally were divided as to the good judgment shown by Capt. Van Schaick in trying to go so far. The captain him'self admitted that it was not until after the fire had been going some time that he realized its fierceness and its rapidity. Captain Van Schaick and pilots Van Wart and Weaver were arrested and were sent to the prison cells of Bellevue Hospital,, for all of them were badly burned.

LAMP EOOM FED THE TIKE.

There was a compartment in the hold of the General

Slocum known as the second cabin. It was forward, just aft the forecastle. In this room were kept the lamps and the oil for them, the gasolene and the brass-polishing liquids, and all the other inflammable supplies. It cannot be determined whether or not the fire started in this cabin. But it was known that the flames were fed there to reach their greatest and most murderous intensity. From that cabin the fire swept back through the boat with a fierceness that no fire-fighting apparatus could hold in check.

THE PITY OF IT.

There were scenes of horror on the General Slocum and on shore such as it would not be decent to set down on paper, even though any chronicler had the ability. It was a boatload of women and little children. For the last mile, when the steamer, spouting flames high into the air, was shooting swiftly out to the Sound with the tide, people on the shore and on other steamers could see the women and children fluttering over the sides into the water in scores. The river is swift there at flood tide. The waves grab forward at one another with hungry white fingers. A strong man would have but little chance. The women and the children had no chance.

There have been heard such stories as often come out after a disaster — stories of cruel selfishness by members of the crew, of cold disregard of the Slocum's distress signals and most evident need by pleasure and business craft in the harbor. In tlie end came the story that there had been looting of the bodies of the dead. Some of these things were more or less true.

HEROIC WORK OF RESCUERS.

But there was a glorious record of self-sacrifice and ol bravery to be set over against all that was evil or unmanly.

$ THE GENERAL SLOCUH DISASTER.

Of such were the bravery with which the old captain and his pilots stayed at their posts ; the noble efforts of Policemen Kelk and Van Tassel, who were on the burning boat, to save the lives of those entrusted to their care ; the beautiful ■■ recklessness of the women nurses and the convalescent pa- 1 tients from the hospitals on North Brother Island, risking ' their lives to dash into the water around the burning boat to pull out drowning children and women ; the brave deeds of the men on the city's boats, the Franklin Edson and the Massasoit, and on the tugs Theo and Wade. Some day someone will fittingly dress out the deeds of that little man, tCapt. Jack Wade, and his daredevil crew. For every one whose deeds were seen and mentally registered in the flying moments of horror and peril, there were hundreds of others in which the rescued were too much scared to appreciate what was being done for them, and the rescuers were too busy to take note for themselves.

Ambulances and patrol wagons from nearly every corner of the city were sent to points along The Bronx shore nearest the wreck. Physicians and nurses came by hundreds, not only from hospitals, public and private, in all the bo- Toughs of the city, but singly, from their private offices, from as far away as Newark and Paterson.

NORTH BROTHER ISLAND A MORGUE.

Bodies were sent down to the Bellevue Morgue from North Brother Island as fast as they were recovered, until there was no more room there. Most of them were unidentified. At about 5 o'clock at night, when the tide was low, there was a sudden increase in the rapidity with which bodies were recovered. They were brought out of the water near where the Slocum had been grounded at the rate of about one a minute. A temporary morgue was established on the island. The systematizing of the work of identification was completed, and it is hoped that nearly all the recovered bodies may be recognized. Some of them were so badly burned that they will never be recognized. At night great silent crowds, thousands and thousands of people, stood in front of the church in Sixth street, in front of the morgue and the Alexander Avenue Police Station, and along the East River shore opposite North Brother Island — ^wherever the bodies of the victims were laid or where news of them could be learned.

THE SLOCUM SAILS OUT GAILY.

The General Slocum, v,dnch was built of wood, started around the Battery at about 7 o'clock on the morning of the fatal day. Her crew of twenty-seven was aboard. She reached the foot of Third street, in the East Eiver, where there is a recreation pier, at about twenty minutes past 8 o'clock.

There were several hundred excursionists already on the pier when the Slocuin arrived. There were mothers full of pride in their lusty German-American babies, and full of anxiety for fear some of them v\^ould fall overboard in their haste to get on board the Slocum before an3^body else did. A band came and went to the after deck and began booming out melodies dear to the German and the East Side heart.

The mothers and children kept pouring across the gang plank and scurrying for "good places" about the decks. The Rev. G. C. F. Haas, and his assistant, the Rev. J. S. Schultz, stood on opposite sides of the gang plank and welcomed the mothers and the scholars. Policeman Kelk and Van Tassel, full of experience in the handling of Sunday School excursions, took posts on the off-shore side of the

?fO THE GENERAL SLOCUM DISASTEE.

steamer, ready to dive after any towhead who by mischance should fall overboard. It was as fine a day for a picnic as ever was. The sunlight made the blue water seem as bright as though it lay anywhere but between the piers of the biggest city of this nation. The ugly factory walls were set off by masts and flags, and big boats and little boats seemed rather to be skittering over the river for their own amusement than for any purpose of sordid profit.

IT WAS AN" IDEAL DAT.

The excursion was late in starting. Lutherans are great folk for going to family picnics in big family parties. Greta and Wilhelmina and August's wife gather from the corners of Manhattan and Brooklyn and bring all their children, and combine their luncheons so that it shall be served to ten or fifteen hungry mouths in proper proportions. And if any one of the whole family circle was late, then all the rest went to Pastor Haas and besought him, by all that was dear and sweet, not to let the boat go until sister and her little ones came. Pastor Haas was goodnatured, and it was well along toward 10 o'clock when the Slocum started, the band on the upper deck playing "Ein Feste Burg 1st Unser Gott."

The children tugged at their skirts, held down by their smiling mothers and big sisters and grandmothers, and cheered at the departing pier. There was not a chill in the air. There was not a cloud on the blue sky. Pastor Haas went up and down the decks, and the matrons loudly communicated their congratulations to him.

Hell Gate, where the tide was rushing out to the Sound with the utmost violence, was passed safely. There isn't a steamer captain in this harbor, no matter though he be as old as Capt. Van Schaick, who is not glad when he has passed through Hell Gate without a collision and without being slewed out of his course against its rocky sides.

STEAMBOAT BURSTS INTO FLAMES.

Though Capt. Van Schaick did not know it, the steamer must even then have been on fire. Just back of the crew's quarters, up in the bow of the steamer under the main deck, is what is called the second cabin. On the Slocum this cabin has been used as a sort of storeroom. Spare hawsers and paint and oils were kept there. Gasolene was kept there, and it was there that Albert Payne, a negro steward, kept the ship's lamps when they were not in place, and cleaned and filled them. Payne, his face ashy with the horrors he had been through, swore that he had finished cleaning all the lamps before the boat left her dock early that morning, and that he had not been in the room, except to see that everything was all right. He swore that just before the boat left East Third street the second cabin was all right.

Along the Astoria shore, where there are many yards for the building of small boats, the trouble was known sooner than it was on the steamer itself. As the Slocum passed Broadway, Astoria, John E. Eonan, a Dock Department em.ployee, was struck with the gayety of the steamer, with her flags, her music and her load of hilarious children, and called to a companion:

"Look at the Slocum ! Don't it make you hate to work when you see a crowd having as good a time as that?"

But a quarter of a mile further on, William Alloway, the captain of a dredge, saw a burst of smoke puff out from the lower deck of the Slocum just forward of the smokestacks. He let off four blasts of his dredge whistle. At the same moment other boats on each side of the river began to toot shrill warnings. Alloway and his men could see a scurrying on the decks of the Slocum. They wondered why Capt. Van Schaick didn't back his boat right into the Astoria shore.

ALARII AT LAST GIVEN ON BOARD. ^

From the best understanding of the situation which could be gained from those who were left alive when everything was over, it was quite a while after the Slocum was first found to be on fire that the seriousness of the situation was understood by all of her officers and crew. Very few of the passengers knew anything of the real danger they w^re in until the burning and drowning had begun.

Eddie Flanagan was the Slocum's mate. On excursion steamers the safety and comfort of the passengers are delegated to the mate, while the captain is in the pilot house, as he always is, very properly, while the boat is in motion. To Flanagan there came a deckhand and Steward McGann. He caught Flanagan by the shoulder and said :

"Mate, there's a fire forward, and it's got a pretty good headway."

Flanagan jumped down through the dark space in the middle of the boat and turned the lever of the fire drill alarm. He sent McGann to warn Capt. Van Schaick. The crew was not enough to handle so many passengers. ' The fire crackled up through one deck after another, licking out far on the port side. There was a rush for the stern. Some of the children thought that the whole alarm was a joke, and laughed and pummeled one another as they ran. The mothers didn't. They lumbered after, trying vainly to keep hold of some one garment on the bodies of each one of their youngsters.

Captain Van Schaick ran back from the pilot-house and saw that Flanagan had two lines of hose run from the steamer's fire-pumps toward the second cabin, and that the water was already spurting through them. The fire drill on the Slocum was always well done. It was held, without any requirement of law, once every week. But this fire was beyond any mere fire drill. It took Captain Van Schaick only a minute to see that he ought to get his passengers ashore as soon as he could. He determined on. the north shore of North Brother Island.

THE FULL HORROR COMES IN HASTE.

It takes time to read of all these things. It took almost no time at all for them to happen. The yells and screams of the few people who were caught on tlie decks below the hurricane deck forward were ringing horribly across the water. The roar and crackle of the oil-fed flames shut these screams off from the frightened mass of Sunday School people aft.

Kelk and Van Tassel had leaped into the crowds when tlie fire-gongs rang. It was due to them that more women and children were not caught forward of the fire. They herded the people back like sheep until nearly the whole company were huddled together on the broad afterdecks. The fire was eating its way back steadily. The people were getting more and more frightened. Moth- \ ers whose children had been separated from them in the rush were getting frantic, and dashing madly through the crowd. Confusion grew almost as fast as the fire at the other end of the boat was growing. Van Tassel took to the rail.

^^Now, everybody keep quiet!" he shouted again and again, waving his big arms reassuringly at women who were grasping the rail and already leaning over and trying to make up their minds to jump.

Pastor Haas had found his wife and his twelve-year-old daughter Gertrude and had put them near the back of a companion way, where he was sure he could find them. He, too, tried to calm his people. He might as well have tried to calm the whirling tide that was bearing the burning | steamer along to its end. They were fighting now. Moth ers who had started side by side with an endless fund of sympathy for domestic difficulties were fighting like wild beasts.

OVERBOARD BY HUNDREDS.

Screams came from the water. A woman looked over and saw three children floating by on the starboard side. The head of one of them was covered with blood where a blade of the paddlewheel had wounded it. The woman screamed just once, so loud that for a moment all the other horrible sounds of the boat seemed hushed. She pointed a finger at the little bodies that were floating back from the forward decks.

Before a hand could be raised to stop her, if indeed there was anyone there cool enough in that moment to raise a hand, the mother jumped on the seat and threw herself over the rail. She sank, whirling over and over in the swift current. So did the children. But other bodies came. As the flames worked upward and backward more and more people were driven to jump to escape being burned. Mercifully, the pilot-house, away forward and up in the air, was in a position which the flames found it hard to reach. The captain and his pilots wem able to keep steering.

It seemed to be the captain's purpose as he came up past 130th street to try to find a berth on The Bronx side of the stream. There are a number of coal and wood yards along there and some factories. Eivermen said that he might well have carried out his plan. The land forces of the Fire DejDartment could have reached him there. But he said that a tug warned him off, telling him that he would only be setting fire to the shore buildings, and would not be helping his people in the least, if he ran in there.

BOATS TO THE RESCUE.

At any rate, the General Slocum, observed now by hundreds of horror-dazed people on both sides of the stream and on the islands, turned again toward North Brother. Steamers and tugs from far down stream were making after her. The Department of Correction boat Massasoit was on the far side of the Brother islands. Her captain lay in wait for the Slocum^ not knowing through what channel she would come. From down stream came the slim, white Franklin Edson, the Health Department boat. Thence, too, came the sturdy little Wade, with her toughtalking, daredevil, great-hearted little captain. Jack Wade. There came also the tugs Theo and Easy Time, tooting their whistles, headed for the burning steamer.

LOOKED TO THE MAINLAND FOR HELP.

On board the Slocum horror was being piled on horror too fa€t for any one to keep track of them. The fire, leaping now high above the framework of the steamer's hoghack and roaring with a smoky glare of red tongues up thirty feet over the tall brown smokestacks, had begun to scorch the edges of the compact mass of women and children who were crowding back out of its way at the rear end of the boat.

The greater number of these people by far were on The Bronx side of the decks. They seemed to feel, poor creatures, that small as their chance for rescue was, when it came it would come from the thickly populated shore rather than from the bleak, rocky, bare spaces on the islands on the starboard side. The Slocum was now opposite 138th street, heading partly across the river toward North Brother Island.

OVERBOARD WITH BROKEN" RAIL.

With a crack and echoing volley of screams that set on edge the teeth of men hardened to almost any form of death or evidence of pain, the port rail of the Slocum's after-deck gave way and all the people near it slipped and slid, one over another, into the water. She had hardly gone 200 yards further on — indeed, by ones and threes and twos and sevens gaily dressed women and little tots all in white were seen whirling down from the deck into the racing tide — ^when worse came. The steamers and tugs in pursuit were catching up one woman here or a child there, but it was not much they could do. The tide was too swift, and there was too much work to be done ahead to warrant any delay over individuals.

EXPLOSION BURIES HUNDREDS.

There was a puff like a great cough down in the Slocum's inwards. A red starry cloud of sparks and smoke and flames shot up and the greater part of the superstructure aft plunged forward into the flames. How many hundreds of lives were snuffed out in that one instant nobody will ever know. Outsiders could see writhing, crawling figures in the burning wreckage, slipping down further and further into the flames until they were gone. As bees cling along a branch when they are swarming, there was a thick clusteiy

THE GENERAL SLOCUM i/ioASTER 17

ing of women, all screaming, and boys and girls around the -edges of so much of the superstructure as was still standing.

At the very back Kelk, the policeman, was standing, catching up some of the smallest children and hurling them out at the decks of the nearest following steamers. Mothers threw their children overboard and leaped after them. When the stanchions burned out and the superstructure fell families were separated.

Thus it happened to Dominie Haas. He had given up as hopeless any effort to get the people quiet, and had just found his wife and daughter. The crash came and he lost them.

BEACHED AT LAST.

i^ow the big steamer, ablaze for more than two-thirds of her 250 feet of length, was rounding the point of North Brother Island. The flames were reaching out for the pilot-house. The door toward the fire was blackened here and there and the paint blisters were bursting with little puffs of fire. But the hundred nurses gathered eagerly on shore waiting a chance to help, saw old man Van Schaick and his pilots at their wheel, straining forward as though by their own physical force they could make the boat go faster.

The captain and Van Wart are both of scrawny, hollowcheeked build. Both have sandy side-whiskers, cropped <5lose. Van Wart is taller than the captain. Weaver, the other pilot, is of heavier build. They made a wonderful picture, the three of them. Afterward, when the horrors were all over except the most ghastly horror of all — the piling up and labeling of the dead — ^men spoke of the picture. It was at no moment certain that the pilot-house would not shrivel up and vanish in a puff of smoke. If if did the Slocum would never get close enough to the shore to make it possible for help to be given to the passengers who were still living. And the two old men and the younger, with never a look backward, whirled their wheel and braced it, and with their teeth set close together and never a word kept their eyes fixed on the one little stretch of rocky beach where it was possible for a steamer as big as. the Slocum to be beached accurately and safely.

They succeeded in the fight that they had been making all the way from the Sunken Meadows, where the Seawanhaka was beached years ago. Capt. Van Schaick was past the Sunken Meadows, he s?id yesterday, before he knew that he had a fire on his boat, and the tide was too strong to let him turn back to beach her there, even had there been any way of rescue out there in the middle of the river.

WORK OF RESCUE.

The only heartening incidents of the whole horrible half hour began happening as soon as the Slocum^s bottom scraped on the North Brother Island shore, about twenty-five feet from the sea wall.

The Massasoit, which was the closest boat behind the Slocum when she struck, drew so much water that it was impossible to get her bow within fifty feet of the Slocum. It didn^t make any difference to Carl Rappaport, her coxswain. He took a running jump forward over the bow and swam toward the burning steamer. Like a big redheaded St. Bernard he grabbed two babies and swam back to his own boat. Meantime the captain of the Massasoit was putting boats overboard as fast as he knew how. When these were out picking up people from the water wherever they could, Rappaport was floundering around helping from the water side.

The Fi-anklin Edson, with her new clean coat of white and gilt paint, drew less water than the Massasoit and went right up to the Slocum's side so that peopk jumped from the burning decks and were dragged back to safety. For safety was not on the forward deck of the Edson. She needs a new coat of paint. Her forward windows were cracked by the heat and there are the marks of flame for the forward thirty feet of her superstructure.

JACK WADE AXD RUDDY m'CARROL.

Jack Wade, master and owner of his little tug, was pitching his life preservers over, turning loose his boats and pushing up so close to the burning decks that the hair on his brawny arms frizzled and his men, John McDonnell, Euddy McCarrol and Bob Brannigan, had their shirts burned of! their backs. It wasn't worth while afterward to attempt to get this crew to tell how many lives it saved. They had been too busy to count.

Ruddy McCarrol was plain beaten out for the first time in his life. The effort which finished him had been getting a very heavy German woman over the side, singlehanded. When she was aboard she began to scream. Ruddy laid himself out flat, face down along the rail, and was sure he was going to die, he was so exhausted.

FIREBOAT COMES FLYING UP.

All along the shore, as the burning steamboat had come along the stream on the breast of the tide, fire alarms had been rung. One alarm at tlie foot of 138th street was rung three times. There was nothing the firemen could do when they came except just one thing, which was done at once. The captain of the first company to arrive at the river's edge telephoned for the fireboat Zophar Mills. She €ame up the river, screaming, with a voice that ontscreamed -all the other whistles which were being blown in every factory and yard from which the blazing steamship could be seen.

The captain of the Mills saw that the Slocnm was beached and that rescuers were more needed than pumpers of water. He ran into 138th street and took aboard Capt. Geoghegan and all the reserves of the Alexander Avenue Station and took them over the river to help in the work of picking people out of the water from rowboats and tugs. There is a big marble works opposite I>rorth Brother Island. The boss, when he saw the Slocum, knocked off all work and :sent his 150 men across in any and every sort of craft that they could lay their hands on.

NURSES WADE OUT UP TO THEIR NECKS.

Meantime the hundred nurses and the tuberculosis paiients were doing wonderful things. Delicate-looldng yo.ung women, in the dainty white uniforms which nurses wear, ran down to the water's brink and waded in up to their necks and formed human chains, along which struggling, half-drowned refugees were passed. Miss O'Donnell, the assistant nurse in charge, went out and brought in seven dead people and eight living. Every other nurse in the place was doing nearly as v/ell. Dr. Watson, the head of the hospital, was out in the Vv'ater with them, cheering them on. Mary McCann, a 16-year-old ward helper, just over from Ireland^ swam out four times and each time brought ta. living child to the shore.

HULK A FURNACE MANY STILL ALIVE ABOARD.

Even though relieved by these evidences — but one or two -out of hundreds that were happening unrecorded — of the working of good and brave human hearts, the misery and the horror were going on almost undiminished. The great hulk was still burning like a furnace on top of the water. Living men and women were still rolling out from her decks. Hundreds sought shelter from the heat under the paddle-boxes, which seemed slow to burn. In there, among the wet paddle-blades, the rescue boats were filled again and again.

SIX- year-old's VAIN" CLIMB FOR LIFE.

Long after every one had given up any idea that there was a human life in the forward part of the boat, except those of Capt. Van Schaick and his two pilots, there was a shout of surprise and agony on shore. A small boy — he seemed about six years old — climbed up to the flagstaff and began to make his way up as though to get away from the deck, which was burning under him. He climbed a little higher and a little higher with each jump of the tongues of flame from below until he was almost at the top. He was a sturdy-looking little chap, and each time he found he had not gone enough he would shake his yellow curls determinedly and work his way a few inches more. It v/as a brave fight, but he lost it. The flagstaff began to tremble, just as a boat was getting around in position to get at the child. The staff fell back into the floating furnace, and the boy with it.