1934 — Sep 8, SS Morro Castle Ship Fire, off Sea Girt, Monmouth County, NJ –134-135
–134-135 Blanchard range.*
— 137 Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. EM DAT Database.
— 137 Country Beautiful. Great Fires of America. 1973, p. 104.
— 137 Smith, Roger. Catastrophes and Disasters. Edinburgh & NY: Chambers, 1992, p. 166.
— 137 Wikipedia. “ SS Morro Castle.”[1]
— 136 National Fire Protection Association. The 1984 Fire Almanac. 1983, p. 140.
— 135 Gallagher. Fire at Sea. 1959, pp. 262-280 (95 passengers and 40 crew).[2]
— 135 National Fire Protection Association. Key Dates in Fire History. 1996.
— 134 Andrews. “Hotel Fire at Sea,” p. 233; pp. 225-234 in Disaster! (Kartman & Brown, eds.) 1948.
— 134 Gallagher. Fire at Sea. 1959, p. 280. [“Total Dead: 134 (official count).”]
— 134 Hicks. When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle… 2006, xvii.
— 134 National Fire Protection Assoc. Spreadsheet on Large Loss of Life Fires (as of Feb 2003).
— 134 Associated Press. “Failure to Aid Liner Charged.” Moberly Monitor, MO, 9-13-1934.
— 134 Snow. Great Gales and Dire Disasters. 1952, p. 76.
— 134 Smith. “Thirty Years Ago – A Ship Named Morro Castle Burned…” NYT, 9-13-1964.
— 134 Walker. Disasters. 1973, p. 53.
— 126 Berman, Bruce D. Encyclopedia of American Shipwrecks. 1972, p. 67.[3]
— 126 US. Merchant Vessels of the [US] Year Ended June 30, 1935. “Vessels Lost,” P. 1028.[4]
* We use 134-135 fatalities as our range in that the “official” death toll (according to Gallagher) was 134, and our counting of fatalities from the listing of passengers and crew provided by Gallagher comes to 135 (including one follow-on pneumonia death). The sources which note 136 or 137 deaths do not provide citations to support. One which notes 136 fatalities (National Fire Protection Association), notes 135 in another NFPA document and 134 in yet another. We do not know how Merchant Vessels determined 126 (perhaps an error with the number meant to be 136?) We speculate Berman (with 126) used Merchant Vessels as his source.
Narrative Information
Smith (NYT), 1964: “Nobody ever called the Morro Castle a happy ship, although the Ward Line’s press agents for her maiden voyage in 1930 said the $5 million liner was among other things, ‘the finest and most luxurious…the safest ship of her size that it has been possible to build’. She proved herself spectacularly unsafe in the early hours of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1934, when she burned a scant eight miles off the New Jersey shore. Of some 300 passengers and 200 crewmen aboard, 134 persons died – a disaster that ultimately prompted an overhaul of safety standards, in construction and inspection, for all American-flag vessels….
“On the evening before the Morro Castle was to reach New York, she was fighting her way through a wild northeast storm. A third of the passengers were seasick. Numbers of the others were getting drunk on the run they had bought in Havana for $4 a gallon; so were many of the crew. Captain Wilmott had just finished his solitary dinner when he collapsed and died. The ship’s doctor diagnosed heart failure induced by acute indigestion. The time was 7:45 P.M.
Thereupon, Chief Officer William F. Warms became Acting Captain. He was a veteran of 37 years at sea, 16 of them with a master’s license. Because of the storm, he had been on duty for 30 hours without sleep – and he was to have eight hours more, in command, before disaster struck.
“At 2:50 A.M., a steward, Daniel Campbell, entering the writing room, saw smoke coming from a locker used to store stationery and a pile of winter blankets. ‘I opened it,’ he said later, ‘and what I knew once as a locker was one mass of flames, flames from top to bottom and from one side to the other side’.”[5]
“Clearly, the fire had been burning for some time; it had already spread behind the decorative false ceiling of the writing room It might have been spotted earlier if Captain Wilmott had not ordered the smoke detectors turned off (he feared the system might pick up the smell of a cargo of wet hides in the forward hold and annoy the passengers). Even so the fire might have been controlled if Wilmott had not ordered many of the ship’s fire hydrants sealed (so they could not drip onto the decks),[6] or if he had not countermanded proper fire drills for the crew (he thought they alarmed the passengers).
“As it was, the fire spread with unbelievable speed and fury. It was fanned by a wind of nearly 40 miles an hour, for Acting Captain Warms, fatigued and not realizing the seriousness of the situation, held on course at more than 18 knots straight into a 20-know wind. He failed also, to order the fireproof corridor bulkheads closed. As a result, the flames swept unobstructed the length of the superstructure, trapping passengers in their cabins….
“Above decks, the living were driven aft by the advancing wall of fire. Few reached the lifeboats. One who did was Chief Engineer Eban S. Abbott, who had taken time after the alarm to put on his full-dress whites, but not to visit the engine room; he cast off with 29 crewmen and three passengers in his boat….[7]
“In the radio shack on the topmost deck, Chief Operator Rogers sat at his sending key, nearly suffocated by smoke, his feet tucked up on the rungs of his chair above the boiling battery acid that sloshed across the floor, and waited patiently for the captain’s order to send an S O S.
“It came at 3:18, nearly half an hour after the discovery of the fire. By then, Warms had swung the ship toward shore…Then the steering failed and Warms ordered the anchor dropped. Rogers pounded out his message: ‘S O S. Twenty miles south of Scotland Light. Cannot work much longer. Fire directly under radio. Need assistance immediately.’
“A Coast Guard boat from Sea Girt, N.J. was the first to reach the scene, shortly before dawn. She was followed by others: by passing liners and freighters, by a fleet of Jersey fishing boats that put out despite the storm. The waves seemed mountainous, and the water thick with bodies; it was hard to tell whether they were alive or dead. The rain cut visibility to less than 400 feet, but the rescuers could steer by the glow of the burning ship. All along the Jersey shore, volunteers improvised first-aid stations – and morgues.
“By 8 o’clock in the morning, about all that could be done for the survivors – and the dead – had been done. The rescue ships pulled away. Only Acting Captain Warms and a dozen or so men – passengers and officers…remained on the forecastle…swinging helplessly on her anchor chain, her plates red hot and hissing when the waves and rain struck them.
“Up steamed the Coast Guard Cutter Tampa, offering to tow the Morro Castle into New York. It took five hours to make all ready. Warms and his companions abandoned ship and collapsed aboard the Tampa. But by then the storm had worsened. In no time, the tow rope snapped, and the Morro Castle’s hulk, driven by wind and tide, washed up broadside on the beach at Ashbury Park, not 150 feet from the resort’s brand new Convention Pier….
“…Warms and Abbott were tried for criminal negligence and sentenced to four and two years in prison, respectively. (The Ward Line and its executive vice president were also tried. They were fined $10,000 and $5,000.) Warms and Abbott appealed and – three years after the disaster – won acquittals. Warms, the appeals court held, ‘had maintained the best traditions of the sea by staying on the vessel until the bridge had burned from under him.’ As for Abbott, the judges decided that his behavior resulted from his being incapacitated by smoke.
“Meanwhile, some 400 survivors and relatives of the dead filed claims against the Ward Line for $13,500,000. The company offered $890,000 and in 1937 the sum was accepted. Then the Ward Line and its insurance company spent another four years wrangling over who should pay. In the end, the insurance company won, with a court ruling that the Ward Line itself, not ‘the negligence of the officers and crew,’ had been responsible and that therefore the insurer was not liable….” (Smith, NYT, 9-13-1964, pp. 74, 76, 78, 82.)
Snow: “The fire started amidships on the port side above a junction of the open and closed promenade, close to the inner writing room.[8] Working their way up from below, the flames spread rapidly and in a few minutes had swept through the elevator shafts and reached the public rooms of B Deck, burning briskly on both the forward and aft main passenger stairways, thus cutting off all passage from either the A or B decks…. Even after the fire was discovered the ship continued to speed at twenty knots into wind of a similar rate, thus creating a force of almost fifty miles an hour which swept the Morro Castle and caused a raging inferno.” (Snow 1952, p. 71.)
Two boats put to sea where they and other nearby ships helped to save hundreds of lives – the Coast Guard accounting for 116 of the rescues. (Snow 1952, p. 75.)
“Of the 562 who were aboard the Morro Castle when she caught fire, 134 died from burning, drowning and exposure, or had been cut to pieces by the propeller blades.” (Snow 1952, p. 77.)
Country Beautiful: “Though the Morro Castle was equipped with the most modern fire-detecting devices, the 240 crew members on board exhibited a profound lack of knowledge of their proper use. Simultaneously with the sounding of a general alarm, the policy of “every man for himself” was adopted. Discipline among the second-rate crew was lax and any sort of preparedness for an outbreak of fire was obviously missing. There was no efficiency and seemed to be no authority.”[9]
“The Ward Line, in an attempt to free itself from blame (and also from the indemnity it would be forced to pay if found negligent), attempted to blame the fire on arson. What was more, these purported arsonists were communist arsonists, according to the company. It was known that there was labor trouble on board, so the company tried to breach the credibility of the radio operator’s testimony because Alagna had been active in organizing strikes for better working conditions.
“A big question in the investigation concerned the delay of the SOS. No call for help was sent until many passengers had already jumped into the sea. Despite the stormy and rainy weather the fire could be seen seven miles away on the Jersey shore. Boats far away inquired about the fire long before a call for help was sent. No one can know what the captain was thinking. He knew that the Ward Line had to pay salvage fees on each SOS call that went out, so perhaps this was a factor.
It was learned that Chief Engineer Eban S. Abbott escaped in Lifeboat No. 1. His conduct could be classed as unheroic at best. He never went below once the fire was discovered but instead turned his responsibilities over to others ordering them to stay with the fire, while he quickly escaped all danger….
As a result of the investigation, Captain William F. Warms and four other officers were charged with negligence. Captain-Warms was charged with delaying the SOS call, failure to stop the ship even after it was obviously on fire, and failure to direct effective fighting of the fire. Charges brought against the chief engineer, assistant engineer and second and third officers had to do with the fact that they saved their own lives without regard to saving the lives of the passengers.
“Captain Warms was sentenced to two years in jail and Chief Engineer Abbott was sentenced to four years. But the sentences were overturned by a higher court and were never served.” (Country Beautiful. Great Fires of America. 1973, p. 103-106.)
Andrews: “….Congress launched an investigation described as ‘the most exhaustive ever undertaken by any government in regard to its merchant marine.’ United States laws protecting life and property at sea were found to lag behind those of all other great maritime nations. A whole new body of protective legislation was drawn up, covering every phase of ship construction and operation.
“The use of fire-retardant materials and the installation of sprinkler systems throughout passenger vessels became mandatory. The Federal Marine Inspection Service was reorganized and enlarge. Radio communications laws were modernized.
“Even more vital was the far-reaching reform of laws affecting merchant-marine personnel. Higher qualifications were demanded. Pay was raised and hours of work limited. Living quarters and working conditions were improved….” [pp.233-234] (Andrews. “Hotel Fire at Sea,” pp. 225-234 in Disaster! (Kartman & Brown, eds.) Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1948.
Newspapers
Sep 9, AP: “The Morro Castle was a luxury liner, named after the historic Morro Castle of Havana Harbor, and built for the Ward Line for commerce between New York City and Havana. At 11,620 tons, the Morro was a “fast turbo-electric liner, owned by the Atlantic Gulf and West Indies Navigation Company and operated by the Ward Line…bound from Havana for New York with 318 vacation travelers and a crew of 240.” (Associated Press, “Salient Facts in Fire,” 9-9-1934.)
Sep 9, 1934, Sunday News and Tribune, MO: “At 3:15 a.m. today, the wireless operator of the liner Morro Castle homeward bound from a vacation cruise with more than 300 passengers, asked all stations to ‘stand by for an emergency’. At 3:19 he repeated the call, and the air was cleared of all traffic. Shortly before 4 a, m., the Morro Castle operator complained of atmospheric conditions, and said it was ‘difficult to maintain contact with shore’. At 4 he sent out a general SOS, reporting that the ship was ablaze, and that the fire was directly beneath the radio room….
“Within the next 60 minutes, the steamer Andrea S. Luckenbach, the coastal steamer City of Savannah, the…liner Monarch of Bermuda, and life boats from New Jersey stations were on their way to the position of the distressed vessel. The radio operator of the Morro Castle reported his position as 20 miles south of Scotland Light. Flames, presumably from a vessel afire, could be seen from Asbury Park, N.J. ….
“At 5:13 a.m., the Luckenbach radioed she was 2 ½ miles from the Morro Castle, and steaming fuel speed. Simultaneously, it was announced from coast guard headquarters that the Tampa and Cahoone were on their way to the indicated position….
“6:20 – The Luckenbach reached the Morro Castle and dropped her hook near the blazing liner, rapidly lowering her boats. 6:25 – The Luckenbach wired that she was ‘picking up survivors’ from the Morro Castle. 6:30 – The City of Savannah and the President Cleveland arrived almost simultaneously, and lowered their own life boats. 7:30 – The Coast Guard reported that surf boats sent out from the New Jersey coast…had picked up 30 passengers. At 8 a.m., police at Spring Lake estimated that 70 or 80 passengers had been brought to land, many of them in such condition that they were taken to the hospital.” (Sunday News and Tribune, Sep 9, 1934, p. 1)
Sep 13, AP: “A seaman on the liner President Cleveland who was on a life-boat sent to the aid of the burning Morro Castle…testified that although he saw several persons on a deck of the stricken ship, the life-boat crew made no offer to take them off. Testifying before a Department of Commerce board investigating the disaster, the seaman, Sidney F. Curtis, declared that although the President Cleveland lay alongside the Morro Castle…’from 40 minutes to an hour’ there were no life-boats lowered during that time…. When a life-boat was finally dispatched to the Morro Castle… its crew made no efforts to board the blazing ship.” (Moberly Monitor, Sep 13, 1934)
Sep 13: “William Francis Price, Brooklyn policeman who was a passenger on the Morro Castle, testified that after his wife was lowered into the water a life-boat refused to pick her up. ‘The life-boat ignored her,’ declared Price. Mrs. Price died.[10] (Moberly Monitor (AP), Sep 13, 1934.)
Sep 13, AP: “The first and third officers of the Cleveland said at the inquiry that they no longer wished to serve with Captain Robert E. Carey, master of the President Cleveland, because, they charged, Carey delayed in sending lifeboats to aid the burning Morro Castle…. The third officer, Harold Peterson….said he believed more lives could have been saved from the Morro Castle if the President Cleveland’s lifeboats had been put out sooner.” (Moberly Monitor (AP), Sep 13, 1934)
Sep 9-10, AP: The cause of the fire was never determined with certainty. At first, there were reports that “lightning was the cause…[and] Police at Havana opened in investigation on a sabotage angle as result of Stevedoring labor troubles on Havana docks.” (Associated Press, “Salient Facts in Fire,” 9 Sep 1934) In addition, one of the deckhands claimed the “intoxicated passengers flipping lighted cigarettes into [a] waste paper basket caused the fire…” (Moberly Evening Democrat (AP), Sep 10, 1934, p.1)
Sources
Andrews, Mary Evans. “Hotel Fire at Sea,” pp. 225-234 in Disaster! (Kartman & Brown, eds.) Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1948.
Associated Press. “Blames Ship Fire on Passengers,” Moberly Monitor-Index, MO. 9-10-1934, p.1. Accessed at: http://www.newspaperarchive.com/PdfViewerTags.aspx?img=77079923&firstvisit=true&src=search¤tResult=1
Berman, Bruce D. Encyclopedia of American Shipwrecks. Boston: Mariners Press Inc., 1972.
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. EM DAT Database. Louvain, Belgium: Universite Catholique do Louvain. Accessed at: http://www.emdat.be/
Country Beautiful Editors. Great Fires of America. Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful, 1973.
Gallagher, Thomas. Fire at Sea: The Mysterious Tragedy of the Morro Castle. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 1959.
Hicks, Brian. When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster and Its Deadly Wake. NY: Free Press, 2006.
Moberly Monitor-Index, MO. “Failure to Aid Liner Charged.” Sep 13, 1934, p. 1. Accessed at: http://www.newspaperarchive.com/PdfViewerTags.aspx?img=77079949&firstvisit=true&src=search¤tResult=0
National Fire Protection Association. Key Dates in Fire History. 1996. Accessed 2010 at: http://www.nfpa.org/itemDetail.asp?categoryID=1352&itemID=30955&URL=Research%20&%20Reports/Fire%20statistics/Key%20dates%20in%20fire%20history&cookie%5Ftest=1
National Fire Protection Association. Spreadsheet on Large Loss of Life Fires (as of Feb 2003). (Email attachment to B. W. Blanchard from Jacob Ratliff, NFPA Archivist/Taxonomy Librarian, 7-8-2013.)
National Fire Protection Association. The 1984 Fire Almanac. Quincy, MA: NFPA, 1983.
Smith, Roger. Catastrophes and Disasters. Edinburgh and NY: Chambers, 1992.
Smith, Sherwin D. “Thirty Years Ago – A Ship Named the Morro Castle Burned in a Classic Mystery Story of the Sea,” New York Times, 9-13-1964.
Snow, Edward Rowe Great Gales and Dire Disasters. NY: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1952, 263 p.
United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection. Merchant Vessels of the United States Year Ended June 30, 1935. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935. Accessed 1-29-2020 at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3330097&view=1up&seq=5
Walker, John. Disasters. Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1973.
Wikipedia. “SS Morro Castle.” Accessed 12-13-2008 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle
[1] No citation is provided for statement that 137 passengers and crew members were killed.
[2] This is our counting of named individuals who were noted to have drowned or fatally burned. We can only speculate that difference between 134 and 135 deaths is the latter number includes the death a few days afterwards of William Haessler of Queens, NY from lobar pneumonia.
[3] We make assumption that Berman followed the US Government Merchant Vessels List. We do not.
[4] Notes location off Sea Girt, NJ, which is about seven miles south of Asbury Park. Also notes complement of 549. No other source we find, other than Berman, uses the 126 fatality number. Given the number of sources noting 134-137, with the names of fatalities listed in Gallagher as well as statement that official death toll was 134, we choose not to use 126 in our range.
[5] “The room was equipped with a fire door which was, for some reason, opened. Had the door remained closed the chances of containing the fire in one room would have been very good.” (Country Beautiful. Great Fires of America, 1973, p. 103.)
[6] Gallagher notes (1959, p. 44), citing Acting Third Officer Howard Hansen: “A woman passenger fell on the deck, wet from a leaky fire station, sprained her ankle and sued the company for twenty-five thousand dollars about a month before the fire. Captain Wilmott then gave orders to take off the hose, cap the stations, and take away spanner wrenches to that they couldn’t be fooled with at drills and start water leaking again.”
[7] Gallagher notes (1959, pp. 156-157), “…of the first ninety-eight people to escape in lifeboats, ninety-two were members of the crew. Passengers trapped at the stern or struggling in the water cried for help as the waves swept these almost empty boats shoreward, and later, those who lived through the experience expressed their grievances openly. It was never explained why the sea anchors in these lifeboats were not used. A sea anchor is a cone-shaped affair, usually of canvas stretched on a frame and hung over the bow of a lifeboat in such a way as to resist motion in the water the way a parachute does in the air. The use of these sea anchors by the seamen in the boats around the Morro Castle would have kept the boats from drifting so rapidly away from the ship and enabled passengers struggling in the water to swim close enough to be hauled in. The failure to use them is perhaps explained by the fact that those in the lifeboats were afraid of the ship blowing up.”
[8] Roger Smith (Catastrophes and Disasters) writes: “…about 2am on 8 September, a passenger found a fire in a writing room, and alerted a steward, who tried to put it out, but (crucially) failed to alert the bridge.” (p. 166)
[9] “The Ward Line that operated the ship was greatly concerned with its profits, and profit-making was achieved at the expense of the crew and, ultimately, the passengers. Conditions were poor on all the ships in the American merchant marine, not just the Morro Castle. The crews were overworked. They put in long hours for low wages and the drudgery was continuous. A ship sailed into port, then immediately set out again. Demoralized crews like the one aboard the Morro Castle were almost inevitable. The Ward Line specifically pursued an adamant anti-labor policy.” (Country Beautiful. Great Fires of America. 1973, p. 103.)
[10] “The traditional law of the sea that women, children and passengers must be saved first was selfishly tossed aside: Of the first ninety-eight to be rescued from lifeboats… ninety-two were crew members.” (Country Beautiful. Great Fires of America. 1973, p. 102; cites Wide World.)