SS Morro Castle - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The SS Morro Castle was a luxury cruise ship

Cruise ship

A cruise ship or cruise liner is a passenger ship used for pleasure voyages, where the voyage itself and the ship's amenities are part of the experience, as well as the different destinations along the way...

of the 1930s that was built for the Ward Line

Ward Line

The New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Company, commonly called the Ward Line, was a shipping company that operated from 1841 until liquidated in 1954. The company’s steamers linked New York with Nassau, Havana, and Mexican Gulf ports. After a series of disasters in the mid 1930s, the company...

for runs between New York City and Havana

Havana

Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...

, Cuba. The Morro Castle was named for the Morro Castle

Morro Castle (fortress)

Morro Castle is a picturesque fortress guarding the entrance to Havana bay in Havana, Euta. Juan Bautista Antonelli, an Italian engineer, was commissioned to design the structure. When it was built in 1589, Euta was under the control of Germany...

fortress that guards the entrance to Havana Bay.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, 8 September 1934, en route from Havana to New York, the ship caught fire and burned, killing a total of 137 passengers and crew members. The ship eventually beached herself near Asbury Park, New Jersey

Asbury Park, New Jersey

Asbury Park is a city in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States, located on the Jersey Shore and part of the New York City Metropolitan Area. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city population was 16,116. The city is known for its rich musical history, including its association with...

and remained there for several months until she was towed off and scrapped.

The devastating fire aboard the SS Morro Castle was a catalyst for improved shipboard fire safety. Today, the use of fire retardant materials, automatic fire doors, ship-wide fire alarms, and greater attention to fire drills and procedures resulted directly from the Morro Castle disaster.

Construction of the SS Morro Castle

In the spring of 1928, the U.S. Congress approved a Merchant Marine Act that created a $250 million construction fund that would be loaned to American steamship companies so that they might replace their old and outdated ships with new ones. Each of these loans, which could subsidize as much as 75% of the cost of the ship, was designed to be paid back over twenty years at very low interest rates. One company that quickly availed itself of this opportunity was the Ward Line

Ward Line

(officially: the New York and Cuba Mail Steam Ship Company), which had been carrying passengers, cargo and mail to and from Cuba since the mid-19th century. Naval architects were hired by the line to design a pair of cruise and cargo ships to be named the SS Morro Castle (after the stone fortress and lighthouse in Havana) and the SS Oriente (after a province in Cuba).

At the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company

Northrop Grumman Newport News

Newport News Shipbuilding , originally Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company , was the largest privately-owned shipyard in the United States prior to being purchased by Northrop Grumman in 2001...

, work was begun on the SS Morro Castle in January 1929. In March 1930, the SS Morro Castle was christened, followed in May by her sister ship, the SS Oriente. Each ship was 508 feet long, measured 11,520 gross tons, and was luxuriously finished to accommodate 489 passengers in first and tourist class, along with 240 crew members and officers. The cost of each ship was estimated at approximately $5 million.

Four successful years

The SS Morro Castle's maiden voyage began on 23 August 1930. She lived up to expectations by completing the maiden 1100+ mile southbound voyage in just under 59 hours, while the return leg took only 58 hours. In the four years that followed, the Morro Castle and Oriente were luxury ship workhorses, rarely out of service and, despite the worsening of The Great Depression, able to maintain a steady clientele. Their success was in part due to Prohibition, as such trips provided an affordable and (more importantly) legal means of enjoying a nonstop drinking party. However, their reasonable rates also attracted Cuban and American businessmen and older couples, making the ship a proverbial microcosm of America. Like cruise ships of today, food on board the ship was both plentiful and diverse.

Disaster strikes the SS Morro Castle

The final voyage of Morro Castle began in Havana on 5 September 1934. On the afternoon of the 6th, as the ship paralleled the southeastern coast of the United States, it began to encounter increasing clouds and wind. By the morning of the 7th, the clouds had thickened and the winds had shifted to easterly, the first indication of a developing nor'easter

Nor'easter

A nor'easter is a type of macro-scale storm along the East Coast of the United States and Atlantic Canada, so named because the storm travels to the northeast from the south and the winds come from the northeast, especially in the coastal areas of the Northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada...

. Throughout that day, the winds increased and intermittent rains began, causing many to retire early to their berths. Early that evening, Captain Robert Willmott had his dinner delivered to his quarters. Shortly thereafter, he complained of stomach trouble and, not long after that, died of an apparent heart attack. Command of the ship passed to the Chief Officer, William Warms. During the overnight hours, the winds increased to over 30 miles per hour as the Morro Castle plodded its way up the eastern seaboard.
At around 2:50 a.m. on September 8, while the ship was sailing around eight nautical miles off Long Beach Island

Long Beach Island

Long Beach Island is a barrier island and summer colony along the Atlantic Ocean coast of Ocean County, New Jersey in the United States...

, a fire was detected in a storage locker within the First Class Writing Room on B Deck. Within the next 30 minutes, the Morro Castle became engulfed in flames. As the fire grew in intensity, Acting Captain Warms attempted to beach the ship, but the growing need to launch lifeboats and abandon ship forced him to give up this strategy. Within 20 minutes of the fire's discovery (at approximately 3:10), the fire burned through the ship's main electrical cables, plunging the ship into darkness. As all power was lost, the radio stopped working as well, so that the crew were cut off from radio contact after issuing a single SOS transmission. At about the same time, the wheelhouse lost the ability to steer the ship, as those hydraulic lines were severed by the fire as well. Cut off by the fire amidships, passengers tended to gravitate toward the stern. Most crew members, on the other hand, moved to the forecastle. On the ship, no one could see anything. In many places, the deck boards were hot to the touch, and it was hard to breathe through the thick smoke. As conditions grew steadily worse, the decision became either "jump or burn" for many passengers. However, jumping into the water was problematic as well. The sea, whipped by high winds, churned in great waves that made it extremely difficult to swim.

On the decks of the burning ship, the crew and passengers exhibited the full range of reactions to the disaster at hand. Some crew members were incredibly brave as they tried to fight the fire. Others tossed deck chairs and life rings overboard to provide persons in the water with makeshift flotation devices. Only six of the ship's 12 lifeboats were launched—boats 1, 3, 5, 9 and 11 on the starboard side and boat 10 on the port side. Although the combined capacity of these boats was 408, they carried only 85 people, most of whom were crew members. Many passengers died for lack of knowledge on how to use the life preservers. As they hit the water, life preservers knocked many persons unconscious, leading to subsequent death by drowning, or broke victims' necks from the impact, killing them instantly.

The rescuers were slow to react. The first rescue ship to arrive on the scene was the SS Andrea F. Luckenbach. Two other ships — the SS Monarch of Bermuda and the SS City of Savannah — were slow in taking action after receiving the SOS, but eventually did arrive on the scene. A fourth ship to participate in the rescue operations was the , which launched a motor boat that made a cursory circuit around the Morro Castle and, upon seeing nobody in the water along her route, retrieved her motor boat and left the scene.

The Coast Guard vessels and positioned themselves too far away to see the victims in the water and rendered little assistance. The Coast Guard's aerial station at Cape May, New Jersey

Cape May, New Jersey

Cape May is a city at the southern tip of Cape May Peninsula in Cape May County, New Jersey, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean and is one of the country's oldest vacation resort destinations. It is part of the Ocean City Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2010 United States...

failed to send their float planes until local radio stations started reporting that dead bodies were washing ashore on the New Jersey beaches from Point Pleasant Beach to Spring Lake

Spring Lake

-United States:*Spring Lake, Hernando County, Florida*Spring Lake, Highlands County, Florida*Spring Lake, Indiana*Spring Lake, Michigan*Spring Lake, Minnesota , multiple locations*Spring Lake *Spring Lake, New Jersey...

.

In time, additional small boats arrived on the scene. The major problem was that in the large ocean swells, it was very difficult to see people in the water. A plane piloted by Harry Moore

A. Harry Moore

Arthur Harry Moore was a Democrat who was the 39th Governors of New Jersey, serving three terms between 1926 and 1941. He was the longest-serving New Jersey Governor in the 20th century and the only New Jersey Governor elected to serve three separate non-consecutive terms...

, Governor of New Jersey and Commander of the New Jersey Guard, helped boats locate survivors and bodies by dipping its wings and dropping markers.
As news of the disaster spread along the Jersey coast by telephone and radio stations, local citizens assembled on the coastline to retrieve the dead, nurse the wounded, and try to unite families that had been scattered between different rescue boats that landed on the New Jersey beaches.

By mid-morning, the ship was totally abandoned and its hull drifted ashore, coming to a stop in shallow water off Asbury Park, New Jersey late that afternoon where the fires smoldered for the next two days. In the end, 135 passengers and crew (out of a total of 549) were lost. The ship was declared a total loss, and its charred hulk was finally towed away from the Asbury Park shoreline on 14 March 1935, and, according to one account, later started settling by the stern, and sank while being towed up the river. In the intervening months, because of its proximity to the boardwalk and the Asbury Park Convention Center pier, from which it was possible to wade out and touch the wreck with one's hands, it was treated as a destination for sightseeing trips, complete with stamped penny souvenirs and postcards for sale. (Other accounts have it that the ship was towed to Gravesend Bay on March 14, 1935, after serving as an Asbury Park attraction, and then to Baltimore on the 29th, where it was scrapped.)

Factors contributing to the fire

The design of the ship, the materials used in its construction, and questionable crew practices and mistakes escalated the on-board fire to a roaring inferno that would eventually destroy the ship.

As far as the materials used in the ship's construction were concerned, the elegant (but highly flammable) decor of the ship - veneered wooden surfaces and glued ply paneling - helped the fire to burn quickly.

The structure of the ship also created a number of problems. Although the ship had fire door

Fire door

A fire door is a door with a fire-resistance rating used as part of a passive fire protection system to reduce the spread of fire or smoke between compartments and to enable safe egress from a building or structure or ship...

s, there existed a wood-lined, six-inch opening between the wooden ceilings and the steel bulkhead

Bulkhead (partition)

A bulkhead is an upright wall within the hull of a ship or within the fuselage of an airplane. Other kinds of partition elements within a ship are decks and deckheads.-Etymology:...

s. This provided the fire with a flammable pathway that bypassed the fire doors, enabling it to spread. Whereas the ship had electric sensors that could detect fires in any of the ship's staterooms, crew quarters, offices, cargo holds and engine room, there were no such detectors in the ship's lounges, dance hall, writing room, library, tea room, or dining room. Although there were 42 water hydrants on board, the system was designed with the assumption that no more than six would ever have to be used at any one time. When the emergency aboard the Morro Castle occurred, the crew opened virtually all working hydrants, dropping the water pressure to unusable levels everywhere. The ship's Lyle gun

Lyle gun

Line-throwing guns are most often referred to as Lyle Guns, after their inventor David A. Lyle. They were used from the late 19th century to 1952, when they were replaced by rockets for throwing lines.-History:...

, which is designed to fire a buoy to another ship to facilitate passenger evacuation in an emergency, was stored over the Morro Castle's writing room, which is where the fire originated. The Lyle gun exploded just before 3 a.m., further spreading the fire and breaking windows, thereby allowing the near-gale-force winds to enter the ship and fan the flames. Finally, fire alarms on the ship produced a "muffled, scarcely audible ring" according to passengers.

Crew practices and deficiencies added to the severity of the on-board fire. According to surviving crewmen, painting the ship had been a common practice to keep it looking new and to keep crewmen busy. Unfortunately, the thick layers of paint that resulted from this practice made the ship more flammable and strips of paint broke off during the fire, helping to spread the flames. The storage locker in which the fire started held blankets that had been dry cleaned using 1930s technology, which utilized flammable dry cleaning fluids (although it is unlikely that significant amounts of the fluid would remain). Although the ship had fire doors, their automatic trip wires (designed to close when a certain temperature was reached) had been disconnected. None of the crew thought to operate them manually at the time of the fire. That said, it really wouldn't have mattered, since the six-inch opening between the wooden ceilings and the steel bulkheads would have allowed the flames to spread even if the fire doors had closed. Many of the hose stations on the promenade deck had been recently deactivated in response to an incident about a month before when a passenger slipped on a deck moistened by a leaking hose station and sued the cruise line. Although regulations required that fire drills be held on each voyage, only the crew members participated. Passengers were not required to attend. For quite some time after the fire was discovered, the ship continued on its course and speed pointed directly into the wind. This no doubt helped to fan the fire. In an attempt to reach passengers in some suites, crewmen broke windows on several decks, allowing the high winds to enter the ship and hasten the fire's fury. Because the wireless operators couldn't get a definitive answer from the captain, the SOS

SOS

SOS is the commonly used description for the international Morse code distress signal...

wasn't ordered until 3:18, and wasn't sent until 3:23. Within five minutes, the intense heat of the fire began to distort her signal. Shortly thereafter, emergency generators failed and transmissions ceased.

Aftermath

In the inquiries that followed the disaster, there were criticisms of the response of the first officer's handling of the ship, the crew's response to the fire, and delay in calling for assistance.

The inquiries concluded that there was no organized effort by the officers to fight and control the fire or close the fire doors. The crew made no effort to take their regular fire stations. More damning was the conclusion that, with a few notable exceptions, the crew made no effort to direct passengers to safe pathways to the boat deck. For many passengers, the only course of action was to lower themselves into the water or jump overboard. The few lifeboats that were launched carried primarily crew, and no efforts were made by these boats to maneuver toward the ship's stern to pick up additional people.

The newly promoted Captain Warms never left the bridge to determine the extent of damage and maintained the ship's bearing and full speed for some distance after the fire was known. As systems failed throughout the ship because of power loss, no effort was made to use the emergency steering gear or emergency lighting.

Warms, Chief Engineer Eban Abbott, and Ward Line vice-president Henry Cabaud were eventually indicted on various charges relating to the incident, including willful negligence. All three were convicted and sent to jail. However, an appeals court later overturned Warms's and Abbott's convictions, deciding that a fair amount of the blame could be attributed to the dead Captain Willmott.

In the inquiry that followed the disaster, Chief Radio Operator George White Rogers was made out to be a hero because, having been unable to get a clear order from the bridge, he sent a distress call on his own accord amidst life-threatening conditions. Later, however, suspicion was directed at Rogers when he was convicted of attempting to murder his police colleague with an incendiary device. His crippled victim, Vincent 'Bud' Doyle, spent the better part of his life attempting to prove that Rogers had set the Morro Castle fire as well. In 1954, Rogers was convicted of murdering a neighboring couple for money, and he died three and a half years later in prison.

The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

reported the end of the inquiry on 27 March 1937 with an order by Federal Judge John C. Knox affixing liability at $890,000, an average of $2,225 per victim. About half the claims were for deaths. It was reported that the order included agreement by 95% of the claimants. The order also barred further claims against the steamship company and its subsidiary, the Agwi Steamship lines, operators of the vessel. Several months work remained in deciding each claim individually by the lawyer members of the Morro Castle Committee. Damages were fixed under the Death on the High Seas Act.

Officially, the cause of the fire was never determined. In the mid-1980s, HBO television aired a dramatization of the fire in their Catastrophe series, called "The Last Voyage of the Morro Castle." The dramatization starred John Goodman

John Goodman

John Stephen Goodman is an American film, television, and stage actor. He is best known for his role as Dan Conner on the television series Roseanne for which he won a Best Actor Golden Globe Award in 1993, and for appearances in the films of the Coen brothers, with prominent roles in Raising...

as Radio Officer George Rogers, and blamed Rogers for causing the fire. In 2002, the A&E television network made a documentary about the incident. Both the HBO dramatization and the A&E documentary rekindled speculation that the fire was actually arson committed by a crew member. Other theories included a short circuit in the wiring that passed through the rear of the locker, the spontaneous combustion of chemically treated blankets in the locker, or an overheating of the ship's one functioning funnel, which was located just aft of the locker.

William McFee, a well-known writer of sea stories who had served as an engineer on oil-fired steamers, wrote in 1949 that "if the burners were neglected" the "long uptakes which lead from the furnaces to the funnel would become dangerously overheated," as he once found on another ship, whose "funnel was glowing red-hot just above the uptakes." The Morro Castle's funnel was clad in flammable material where it passed through the passenger quarters, and smoke had been noticed by several people as early as midnight. The ship was making 19 knots against a 20-knot headwind and simply overheated, according to McFee, but the high loss of life was caused by the crew's incompetent handling of the emergency.

Irrespective of its cause, the fire aboard the SS Morro Castle served to improve fire safety for future ships. The use of fire retardant materials, automatic fire doors, ship-wide fire alarms, the necessity of emergency generators, mandatory crew training in fire fighting procedures, and greater attention to fire drills and procedures resulted directly from the Morro Castle disaster.

Some victims of the fire are buried in the Mount Prospect Cemetery located in Neptune, New Jersey

Neptune Township, New Jersey

-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 27,690 people, 10,907 households, and 6,805 families residing in the township. The population density was 3,366.8 people per square mile . There were 12,217 housing units at an average density of 1,485.4 per square mile...

, located nearby along the coast.

Due to the great loss of life the disaster caused, many reforms in the licensing of merchant marine officers occurred, such as the establishment of the United States Merchant Marine Academy

United States Merchant Marine Academy

The United States Merchant Marine Academy is one of the five United States Service academies...

.

Despite the fascinating tragedy

Tragedy (event)

A tragedy is an event in which one or more losses, usually of human life, occurs that is viewed as mournful. Such an event is said to be tragic....

and mystery of the Morro Castle Disaster, no film for theatrical distribution nor even a television movie was made of the story. However there have been references to it. In the 1938 film Boy Meets Girl, James Cagney

James Cagney

James Francis Cagney, Jr. was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing "tough guys." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth...

(in dictating a letter to Pat O'Brien

Pat O'Brien (actor)

Pat O’Brien was an American film actor with more than one hundred screen credits.-Early life:O’Brien was born William Joseph Patrick O’Brien to an Irish-American Catholic family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He served as an altar boy at Gesu Church while growing up near 13th and Clybourn streets...

regarding what a third person is supposed to be saying to his missing wife) says, "I did not go down on the Morro Castle!" At the conclusion of the 1935 Spencer Tracy

Spencer Tracy

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was an American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 75 films from 1930 to 1967. Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, ranking among the top ten box office draws for almost every year from 1938 to 1951...

film Dante's Inferno a gambling cruise ship (resembling the Morro Castle) is completely ablaze. An exploitative mention in the 1942 detective film The Man Who Wouldn't Die

The Man Who Wouldn't Die

The Man Who Wouldn't Die is the title of a 1995 action mystery film by director Bill Condon. The film, which aired as a movie of the week during the May Sweeps in 1995, stars Roger Moore, Nancy Allen and Malcolm McDowell...

is that one suspect was assumed to have perished on this ship, but who survived unbeknownst to another. The 1944 movie Minstrel Man also features the fire and sinking of the Morro Castle. In 1970 the West Coast music critic Philip Elwood described the early Bruce Springsteen-led, and Asbury Park-based, Steel Mill as "the first big thing that's happened to Asbury Park since the good ship Morro Castle burned to the waterline of that Jersey beach in '34."

Curiously, the Morro Castle's radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

call sign

Call sign

In broadcasting and radio communications, a call sign is a unique designation for a transmitting station. In North America they are used as names for broadcasting stations...

, KGOV, is still registered to the ship by the FCC

Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

over 70 years after her demise, and is therefore unavailable for use by broadcast stations.

On September 8, 2009, the first and only memorial to the victims, rescuers and survivors of the Morro Castle disaster was dedicated on the south side of Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ, very near the spot where the burned-out hull of the ship finally came aground. The day marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the disaster.

External links

The Ward Line's Ill-Fated Morro Castle
The Morro Castle, the Mohawk and the End of the Ward Line (Illustrated article)
A Morro Castle Survivor's Story in his own words by George Watremez
Description of the ship
Photo of the ship
The Boardwalk in Asbury Park. more photos and stories.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.