Shipwreck Quotes

“Doyle was puzzled by the instructions and by the fact that they carried no signature. He looked again at the label. It had been typed on the standard office machine of the radio department. This also puzzled him. He turned toward the door, intending to ask Rogers for a comment. Rogers had disappeared. Doyle shrugged and turned back to the heater. For a moment he toyed with the heater, then plugged it into the workbench’s double-outlet plug. He flicked the switch on the outlet plug. The resulting explosion broke windows in the workshop, and shook the main police headquarters building over two hundred feet away. It was a miracle that Doyle escaped death. His left hand, left leg, and right foot were smashed. His left eardrum was fractured. He was rushed to Bayonne Hospital, where he underwent an emergency operation. The next day Rogers visited Vincent Doyle in the hospital, and asked through his tears: “How can I get the guy who did this to you?” Two weeks later Rogers was charged with the attempted murder of Vincent Doyle.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“News of the verdicts brought a marked change in Rogers. He became almost obsessive in his desire to discuss the fire on the Morro Castle. Increasingly, he dwelt on how the blaze had been set. Doyle began to keep a record of his assistant’s statements. Finally, he noted: “George knows that I know he set fire to the Morro Castle.” Doyle decided to wait. He knew that what Rogers had told him was not strong enough to obtain a conviction. If questioned, Rogers could always escape by pleading idle boasting, something his police colleagues knew he was capable of. Vincent Doyle told no one of his suspicions. But he continued to question Rogers on every aspect of the Morro Castle disaster, and began to form a picture of Rogers which was remarkably in tune with later psychiatric reports. The strange cat-and-mouse questioning went on until early March 1938. Then, on March 3, a quiet Thursday afternoon, Doyle and Rogers sat down for yet another discussion on the peculiar fate of the Morro Castle. At the end of it Doyle knew “exactly how Rogers set the fire. He told me how to construct an incendiary fountain pen; how it had been placed in the writing-room locker’.” Doyle wondered how best to present his sensational evidence to his superiors. He was still worrying over it next afternoon when he met Rogers outside the police radio department. Rogers seemed pensive and withdrawn. “There’s a package for you,” said Rogers. Doyle nodded and went into the department. Rogers remained just outside the doorway. On the workbench was a package. Doyle unwrapped it and found a heater for a fish tank. There was nothing unusual in that; from time to time Doyle used the department’s facilities to repair electrical equipment for his colleagues. Attached to the fish tank was a typed label: This is a fish-tank heater. Please install the switch in the line cord and see if the unit will work. It should get slightly warm.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“In April 1937, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous decision, set aside the conviction of Warms and Abbott. “Warms,” said the Appeals Court, “maintained the best tradition of the sea by remaining on his vessel until the bridge burned under him and all others had left.” The court held that Abbott’s behavior in leaving the ship was “caused by suffering from smoke, and therefore he was not responsible.” Following the decision, Warms told reporters in an uncustomary burst of eloquence, “It was the judgment of God. I was innocent and God knew it. While patience is bitter, it bears sweet fruit, as the Orientals say, and I have been patient for two years and seven months awaiting the decision.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“In June 1936, George White Rogers joined the Bayonne police force. He was assigned as assistant to Vincent Doyle in the radio department.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The verdicts in the criminal trial arising out of the Morro Castle disaster caused a new sensation. William Warms was sentenced to two years imprisonment; Eban Abbott received four years; Ward Line vice-president Henry E. Cabaud was fined five thousand dollars and given one year’s suspended sentence.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“On the day the hulk was towed away from Asbury Park, George White Rogers opened a radio-repair shop in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was the first time he had worked in some months. Customers found Rogers a bombastic shopkeeper, fond of telling them how lucky they were to have their radio sets mended by him. His business dropped off. One day in February 1935, Rogers left the shop “to get a breath of air.” Shortly afterward it caught fire. Bayonne police files reveal: “An inventory made by Rogers disclosed equipment had suffered damage to the extent of $1200. Arson was suspected. But no proof existed to warrant an arrest. He collected from the insurance company.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“In London, Lloyd’s underwriters settled $2,500,000 in insurance liability. In the end the Ward Line collected $4,188,999 in insurance. The line sold the Morro Castle to Union Shipbuilding of Baltimore for $33,605 as scrap iron.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“By Christmas 1934, over three hundred claims totaling $1,-250,000 had been filed against the Ward Line by survivors and relatives of the dead. The Ward Line asked the federal court to limit the total of any single claim to $20,000 and offered $250,000 as a full and final settlement. Lawyers for the line based their case on the “limited liability” law that had been on the statute books since 1851. The 1851 law was clear that in the event of disaster, “only by proving the owners to have possessed knowledge of the unseaworthiness of the vessel or the inadequacy of the crew before sailing,” could passengers collect.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“In Washington, the Hoover Board of Inquiry found that negligence on the part of the two officers had caused the ship’s destruction. In its summary, the board dismissed the possibility of arson: “Considerable testimony to the effect that explosions disconnected gas lines, infers this to be the cause. But in running down possibilities of malicious acts, nothing definite was revealed.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Cabaud was charged with “willfully and knowingly causing and allowing the violations of the law” that Warms and Abbott were charged with.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Chief Engineer Abbott was accused of:
1. Failure to assign members of his department to proper posts during the fire. 2. Failure to report to his own station in the engine room and consequently giving no instructions to his men. 3. Failure to hold proper fire drills. “Abbott had charge of the water pressure, and knew it to be inadequate,” the indictment asserted, “but did nothing to increase it. He also was responsible for the ship’s lighting and generators, and did nothing when they failed.” The chief engineer’s decision to abandon ship was also attacked: “He did not report at his lifeboat station; he failed to direct passengers to the boats; as a matter of fact he left the vessel in lifeboat one, and when he got in the lifeboat made no effort to rescue anyone else.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“On December 3, 1934, the grand jury handed out indictments. Accused of willful negligence were Acting Captain William Warms, Chief Engineer Eban Abbott, and Ward Line vice-president Henry E. Cabaud. In the preamble to the charges against Warms, the indictment declared: “Members of the crew were without discipline and did not know what to do, and the passengers were left to help themselves; the passengers in large numbers were pushed into the water or jumped in the water or perished in the fire.” Warms was accused specifically of failing to observe the law in ten matters:
1. To divide the sailors in equal watches. 2. To keep himself advised of the extent of the fire. 3. To maneuver, slow down, or stop the vessel. 4. To have the passengers aroused. 5. To provide the passengers with life preservers. 6. To take steps for the protection of lives. 7. To organize the crew to fight the fire properly. 8. To send distress signals promptly. 9. To see that the passengers were put in lifeboats and that the lifeboats were lowered. 10. To control and direct the crew in the lifeboats after the lifeboats had been lowered.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“It was Rogers who hurried to the carpenter shop beneath the forecastle and reappeared triumphantly, holding a hacksaw. He insisted on taking the first turn at cutting through the forged steel link. Soon, he tired of the task and handed the saw to a seaman. Then he wandered off, whistling to himself. Psychiatrists who later examined Rogers or studied his own account of these events have been struck by the marked disturbance of his thinking. A disturbed or psychotic personality suffering from this “thought disorder” has tremendous difficulty separating the relevant from the irrelevant, recalls and remembers everything, describes events in almost incredible detail. Rogers’ description of what happened to him when he left the bridge clearly displays this condition: “There had been a canary down in the hold of the ship. It belonged to the boatswain. I had seen the canary there. I was looking for a pair of shoes. I had lost mine overboard. “I got the canary and put a towel around the bird and came up. He was the only living thing down there. I got halfway up and the heat was terrific. I went all the way with the flashlight and I noticed there was a space of about four feet on the bulkhead that was beginning to glow, turning red.” Clutching the canary, he shuffled back to the deck and delivered the “news that the place was glowing hot down there and it’s a shame to use a five-and-ten-cent method to saw through the chain.” Suddenly the steel link snapped. In all, five hours had passed since the Tampa first offered help.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Acting Captain Warms’ reasons for not requesting help from the cutter are equally unsatisfactory. He had not anticipated that the Tampa would carry such gear. Even so, he declared later, it would not have been feasible to ferry it across in such weather.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The Coast Guard patrol boat watched the City of Savannah steaming off toward New York. The Cahoone’s captain believed this, coupled with the general view of the situation, conveyed the impression that all passengers had been rescued. It was an unhappy mistake. Another followed. The Cahoone called up the Monarch of Bermuda. The Cahoone’s log recorded: “Monarch of Bermuda so busy handling press radio traffic that we cannot break in with a call.” The Monarch of Bermuda later denied the charge; its radio operators insisted they were only transmitting names of survivors and dead. Next the Cahoone approached the Morro Castle. The patrol boat’s log documents another curious incident: “Held verbal conversation with the crew of the Morro Castle, grouped on forecastle deck. When asked if they wanted to be taken off, some member of the crew, apparently an officer, replied they were going to stand by for a tow to port.” The official Coast Guard report on the Cahoone’s role makes equally strange reading: “Had the Morro Castle or the Monarch of Bermuda given the Cahoone any information that lifeboats had gone ashore or that passengers had jumped over the side, the Cahoone could have gone inshore to search, and possibly some lives might have been saved by that vessel.” (Author’s italics) In all, the Cahoone spent ninety minutes floundering around the Morro Castlebefore going off to search for swimmers. In the end it recovered two bodies.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“There is one inescapable fact: by the time the SOS was sent, the Morro Castle was beyond help.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The chief engineer was not the only member of the crew who disregarded the safety of the passengers. Of the first eighty people lowered away in lifeboats, seventy-three were crew members.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Acting Captain Warms was still unaware that at least one lifeboat had been launched without his authority and that passengers were jumping into the sea. The calmness which a few hours before had impressed the purser and First Officer Freeman was gone.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Regulations governing the sending of distress signals at sea are strict: no SOS can be sent without the express order of the captain. But the rules also allow an operator some leeway. It would have been proper for Rogers to have sent a message such as “Fire on Morro Castle off New Jersey. Awaiting orders from bridge.” Such a message would have alerted the outside world. No one could later have criticized such a course of action, confirming the Luckenbach’s sighting a serious fire through ten miles of rain. While it was not a formal SOS, it would nevertheless have been a standby call for help. And the time to send it was now. At 3:15 a.m. the mandatory “listening-out” period for all radio operators at sea began. Instead of a distress signal, Rogers sent: “Standby. DE KGOV.” KGOV was the call sign of the Morro Castle.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“For twelve minutes George White Rogers sat calmly by the main transmitter, waiting for an official order to summon outside help. Rogers had been sound asleep in his bunk when the fire alarm sounded. George Alagna had had to shake him quite hard to wake him. The two men dressed quickly and joined Maki in the radio room. Rogers tuned to the main six-hundred-meter distress frequency, and threw the switch into a position which would ensure that the transmitter would produce a very broad interfering path. Evidence of fire was quite apparent from the radio shack. As far as the radio operators could tell, it seemed to be just below and forward on the port side, by the writing room. The radio room was filling with smoke. When Rogers went to the door he could see the reflection of the flames and hear shouting and confused commands.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The Morro Castle traveled 3.1 miles head on into the storm at a speed of 18.8 knots for over ten minutes. In that time, the wind, gusting at over 20 knots, had acted as a giant bellows, fanning and speeding the flames the length of the ship.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Acting Captain Warms’ first terrible miscalculation came when he executed the textbook turn into the wind to meet the storm squall.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Coming up the stairway was Antonio Bujia. Eban Abbott peered at him. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” “To the bridge. I called you through the telephone and speaking tube and got no answer. Everything is running good. But we cannot stay down there much longer.” The two men looked at each other. Wisps of smoke were drifting around the staircase. “Go back and stand by. I’ll go to the bridge,” said Abbott. With those few words he changed his whole future; he would regret them all his life. Shocked and disoriented though Abbott still was by Captain Wilmott’s death, he had been moving, albeit slowly and in a roundabout way, down toward the engine room. If he had been challenged about his movements, he could defend himself by pointing out that, as chief engineer, it was also his job to ascertain the extent of the fire so that he could organize the water supplies accordingly. But Bujia had brought Abbott head on with the reality of the situation: the engine room, in his assistant’s estimation, had shortly to be abandoned. There was only one course of action open to Eban Abbott. It was to go down to check out the situation himself. Abbott was charged with the responsibility to ensure that the men in the engine room performed their duties fully in operating the fire pumps, lights, and power to steer the ship through the growing crisis. He abandoned this responsibility when he ordered Bujia back down below and rapidly climbed to the safety of the open deck.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“But it was futile. Half a dozen hoses under full pressure would have been required to make an impact on the blaze enveloping the writing room. Even if fire crews had brought hoses to bear on the flames, it would have made little difference: the engine room was unable to provide sustained pressure because of the closed boiler.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Solid-steel fire doors had been built into entrances to the public rooms to deal with just such an emergency. It would have taken Hackney only a few moments to isolate the writing room from the rest of B deck by lowering its fire door. Clarence Hackney did not take that preventive measure. Smoke billowed after him as he ran for the telephone near the door connecting the first-class lounge to the smoking room. He dialed the bridge.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“It’s in that locker!” Campbell shouted. Opening the locker, he saw a mass of flames inside. Quickly, he slammed shut the door, blistering his hands in the process. Both men turned and ran from the room to raise the alarm. As they ran, they passed a fire extinguisher placed on the wall near the writing-room door. It was the first mistake by members of a crew poorly trained in fire drills, rescue operations, or virtually any crisis. If Campbell and Ryan had turned that extinguisher on the fire at once it might have made a critical difference. Three vital minutes passed before Clarence Hackney arrived with his fire extinguisher. He yanked open the locker door and a wall of flame rushed out. Hackney backed off and emptied his extinguisher into it, but it was a waste of time—a dozen extinguishers could not have contained the inferno now raging around the locker.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“At 2:51 A.M. student engineer Tripp wrote in his log: “Night watchman Foersch reported to captain that he had just seen and smelled smoke coming out of one of the small ventilators on the port after side of the fiddley.” The fiddley was a galvanized-iron duct supplying fresh air to the first-class writing room on B deck, among other rooms.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“A locker in the first-class writing room containing, among other things, spare jackets for the stewards and waiters, was a perfect site for an incendiary bomb. The locker was immediately below the false ceiling to which the line-throwing Lyle gun and twenty-five pounds of dangerous explosives had been moved. Rogers himself had watched the seamen dump gun and powder barrel into the space between the false ceiling and the deck. The gunpowder would make a perfect trailer. Another trailer was even closer at hand. Near the radio room were two gasoline tanks, used to run the transmitting equipment. It would be a simple matter to uncouple the feed line, allowing the gas to trickle down the deck. Night watchman Arthur Pender, who passed only a few feet from the tanks, smelled a strong odor of gasoline, which he did not report to the bridge, thinking the smell must be the result of late cleaning on the eve of the ship’s arrival in port. If Pender had reported it, even a cursory investigation might have revealed the preparations for sabotage. But he did not. In his investigations Captain George Seeth—who knew well both the Morro Castle and Rogers—suggested how Rogers probably placed his bomb: “Nobody would be surprised to see a radio officer in the writing room. Rogers or one of his staff frequently took messages to passengers, and walking through the writing room was a short cut from their shack. “Again, nobody would have been surprised if Rogers had gone to the locker itself. He would have had a ready excuse to say he was looking for a piece of paper to scribble down a message a passenger had just given him for transmission.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“There is strong circumstantial evidence that during the twenty minutes he was taking “a breath of air,” George White Rogers prepared an incendiary device—or several such devices—designed to set the Morro Castle on fire and threaten the lives of all its crew and passengers.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The three volumes on the case compiled by Police Captain Vincent Doyle and exhaustive investigations by Captain Wilmott’s lifelong friend Captain George Seeth provide further evidence. As far as is known, Doyle and Seeth never met. Neither was even aware of the other’s existence. Yet, somewhat astonishingly, both came to the conclusion that Rogers poisoned Captain Wilmott as a deliberate act of retaliation.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle