BLAZING SHIP

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4607, 9 October 1934, Page 7

BLAZING SHIP

MORRO CASTLE DISASTER. PASSENGERS IN PANIC. San Francisco, Sept. 12. A bewildering- maze of rep»rt#, accusations and theories ranging from the terror of incendiarism to the tragedy of carelessness, and rumours of the captain having met foul play, faced the Federal investigators as they sought to pierce the mystery of the Morro Castle disaster, said to be the worst since the Woi'ld War. Sabotage, murder, lightning, a lighted cigarette or match—all these were charged or hinted as being involved in the fire which transformed the 5,550,000-dollar luxury liner to the smoking hulk beached off Asbury Park, New, Jersey. The most horrible hypothesis advanced was that incendiarism doomed the giant liner; that the men, women and children who died were really victims of wholesale murder.

The fact that the fire was out of control almost as soon as it was discovered, in spite of the ship's prized fire-fighting system; that two mysterious explosions announced the catastrophe; that the ship's master died nine hours before the blaze; that labour troubles, assertedly on the Ward Line's Havana docks, resulting in riots in which two longshoremen were killed and scores of citizens and soldiers wounded, broke out shortly before the liner left Cuba —these facts and many others were to come under the inquiry's spotlight. Officials, rescue workers, reporters and photographers who boarded the ill-fated ship found her a twisted mass of iron and steel, her lavish appointments completely destroyed. Pitiful evidences of what had happened were there on the charred decks. Lying- about were such articles as vanity cases, compacts, dancing slippers, a woman's hat, a man's spectacle case, a camera and a portable radio. And shoes—everywhere there were shoes. Most of the passengers removed their shoes before they jumped overboard.

Priest Gave Absolution

A rain-lashed, blazing deck, a huddled crowd of frightened passengers on their knees in prayer, and above them silhouetted on a companionway, a priest with his hand raised to give absolution —that was the vivid picture that came from one survivor, James Brodie, Hartford, Connecticut. Father Egan, an instructor of Fordham University, was the priest who calmed the crowd when it began to get panicky as the flames became more menacing, Brodie reported. The priest was among the missing.

The catastrophe caught several parties of the gayer passengers still celebrating the final night of the holiday cruise in wine and song. When the smoke seeped into the salons where they held forth, glasses were dropped and a rush made for the exits. Soon men in dinner jackets and women in evening gowns were caught in the mad swirl on the decks. Cool hands among the crew: tried to herd the frenzied passengers to the lifeboats, but the mass of flame, by sheer volume and killing heat, made many of them too terrified to obey. One poised on the rail, sang "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." He was rebuked by a young girl, who told him at such a time he should be saying his prayers. A man of foreign aspect knelt on the scorching boards to pray and a seaman grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hustled him into a lifeboat, barking: "Say your prayers later."

Failure of Lifeboat System

A driving north-easter, whipped the bulk of the blaze toward the port side of the vessel, rendering the six lifeboats on that side useless. To get to the boats on the starboard side meant a short and terrifying dash across a space lashed by falling cinders and thick tongues of flame. Few were willing to risk it.

Only five of the starboard lifeboats were launched. The sixth fell, and was swamped when its ropes burned. Taking passengers on the lifeboats was rendered difficult by the fact that the bulk of the passengers were on the levels below the boat deck, where the boats hung. Most of those who were taken on board the small boats climbed in as they were being lowered past the A and B decks.

Leroy Kelsey, a seaman, dramatically described the scene on the ship. The crew! had succeded in getting all passengers on deck, he said, despite the inferno which raged through the superstructure after starting in the library in the fore of the ship. Flames licked out across the several decks. Smoke, kept down by the heavy weather, assailed the nostrils of the men and women who had been aroused from their slumbers and ordered on deck in night clothing and hastily donned garments. The crew urged them to cross the decks and enter the boats. Sparks and cinders fell about them. The wall of smoke grew heavier, and the passengers, becoming frenzied, refused to risk a

few short steps needed to take them to the rail and safety in the boats. "They refused to go through the smoke and flames. We pleaded with them. We tried to herd them, but few of them would go. Many even tried to fight past us and get back down the ladders to the lower decks. Finally we were forced to take to the boats without them as the sparks and cinders were burning the ropes." Against this some passengers alleged that the crew "never raised a hand" to help them. And there is the assertion, made by a member of Congress, that the crew of the Morro Castle was "new and undisciplined," because the owners followed the practice of hiring a crew just before the day of sailing, dismissing it after each trip and engaging another before sailing again. Identifying the Bodies. It was a poignant scene at the morgue. The dead lay on army cots, white shrouds over them, in a building called the "Post Exchange." The women were placed in two rows, the men in two adjoining rows. In another part of the morgue lay the children. Relatives went seeking loved ones, and fearfully they made identifications. Silently, and with anticipated tragedy written on their faces, they passed along the row of cots, led by a National Guard officer. He would gently remove the covering from the face of one of the dead. The person or group about to make an identification would take a quick, apprehensive look. A negative shake of the head from the onlooking would cause the officer to move to the next cot. And so on. Suddenly a woman would shriek and faint. She had recognised a husband, a daughter, or perhaps a child.