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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In the engine-room log he noted the closing down of number three boiler. Eban Abbott took the elevator back to his cabin, washed, and dressed. Only after completing his toilet did he set out to discover why Captain Wilmott had not replied. It was exactly 7:45 P.M. when he stepped out of his cabin.
Moments later First Officer William Warms stood in the captain’s night cabin, shocked and horrified. Slumped over the side of the bath, half dressed, lay the body of Robert Wilmott, his eyes open, but obviously dead.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The blockage was in the forward fire room boiler. The chief engineer checked the mechanically atomizing burners and the regulator controlling the flow of fuel. After thirty minutes’ inspection, Eban Abbott knew the only way to clear the blockage was to strip down the feeder system, something which could be done only in port. He ordered the faulty boiler closed down. It would have an effect on the ship’s speed. The Morro Castle would not be able to reach 20 knots for the rest of the voyage. Nor would the engine room now be able to meet any sudden call for maximum water pressure. The boiler was part of the system which fed the fire hydrants.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Chief Engineer Eban Abbott was about to dress for dinner when the engine room called. Assistant Engineer Antonio Bujia reported that one of the battery of fire boilers had a fuel blockage.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Pender was shocked to see that the two other night watchmen, who should have been on deck, had been drafted to help with cabin service. The Morro Castle was now protected by only four men: Fourth Officer Howard Hansen, the officer of the watch; a helmsman; the bow lookout; and night watchman Pender. Pender regarded this as the most flagrant breach yet of the rules governing safety at sea.
Another violation of those rules kept First Officer William Warms awake in the early hours of Thursday morning. His previous uneasiness had crystallized around one thing: the lack of boat drills on the Morro Castle.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“In all, seventy-one insurance companies throughout the world had insured the Morro Castle for $4,200,000. One third of the total was underwritten by British companies, principally by Lloyd’s of London. But under the complicated limited-liability law of 1851, the Ward Line had little responsibility for insuring the passengers. In the event of disaster, the law stated that “only by proving the owners to have possessed knowledge of the unseaworthiness of the vessel or the inadequacy of the crew before the fatal sailing,” could passengers collect any insurance. In practical terms this was almost impossible. The real owners of the Morro Castle had virtually no knowledge of the ship—a state of affairs which, given the terms of the law, was very much in their best interests. The Ward Line was just one subsidiary in the powerful shipping complex of Atlantic Gulf and West Indies—AGWI. The involvement of Franklin D. Mooney, president of AGWI, with the Morro Castle, gives some indication of just how little the owners knew—or cared to know—about this particular piece of property.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“George White Rogers’ interview with Captain Wilmott exceeded Rogers’ wildest hopes. He had planned it with care in order to achieve just the right balance of distaste and distress in relating the story. It was a simple one: for weeks, he told Wilmott, he had suspected that George Alagna was quite capable of stirring up trouble. But he would never have suspected the trouble would reach the proportions it had. Now he even had proof: the discovery of the two bottles of dangerous acids. Captain Wilmott was so shaken by the revelation that he accepted without question the chief radio officer’s statement that he had thrown the bottles over the side immediately on discovering them. The story of the bottles reinforced Robert Wilmott’s fears tenfold. “I think the man is crazy!” he ranted to Rogers. “We have always had trouble with that man! In New York he went down the gangway and started a riot when the passengers were getting off because he wanted to get off the ship without having his crew pass stamped by the immigration authorities”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“At exactly 8:45 P.M., George Alagna tuned the receiver in the radio shack to the six-hundred-meter frequency, the distress wave band for ships at sea. The mandatory three-minute period of silent “listening out” is an international watch kept by all ships at sea. For three minutes at precisely fifteen minutes past and fifteen minutes before each hour, every marine radio operator on duty stops transmitting and tunes to the emergency channel, listening for even the weakest distress signal. Junior Operator George Maki watched carefully as Alagna fine-tuned the instruments. Maki himself sometimes found it difficult to locate the frequency; on several occasions Chief Radio Officer Rogers had noticed Maki’s hesitation, and he used each occasion to give Maki a tongue-lashing. Ever since Rogers had assumed command of the wireless room, his hostility toward Maki had increased. The chief radio officer made special note of each of Maki’s faults: he was slow on direction finding, decoding meteorological bulletins, and switching smoothly across the transmitting and receiving wave bands. Maki knew his career as a radioman would be terminated abruptly if Rogers made a report to the Radiomarine Corporation. Rogers chose not to file any official complaint; instead, he kept Maki on as a personal whipping boy, somebody he could verbally castigate whenever he wanted to.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“The seamen who dumped gun and powder barrel into the hiding place Hackney had found carried the apparatus past the wireless room. When Chief Radio Officer George Rogers stopped them to ask what they were doing, they told him the purpose of their mission. He expressed interest, saying he never knew the space existed.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“How this extraordinary situation could possibly have gone undetected can be explained in part by the fact that the required annual inspection of the ship had been carried out by government inspectors on May 16, 1934, a month before Captain Wilmott issued his order. The inspectors concluded that the Morro Castle still had the right to “the highest classification” of the American Bureau of Shipping.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“First Officer William Warms had given the order. It is almost certain there would have been no fire drill if Captain Robert Wilmott had been in full command. Warms’s order directly contradicted a policy the master of the Morro Castle first instituted on June 16, 1934. On that day—in violation of the seaworthy certificate issued by the government’s Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, and at the risk of endangering the lives of everybody on board—Captain Wilmott had banned all further fire drills. His order could lay him open to prosecution, imprisonment, and the certain loss of his master’s license. Confronted by the classic dilemma of the company man, Wilmott had acted in what he believed to be the Ward Line’s best interests. The basis for his decision was simple. In May 1934, during a fire drill, a woman passenger had fallen on a deck wet down by a leaking joint connection between a fire hose and its hydrant. She fractured an ankle and hired a good lawyer, and the Ward Line settled out of court for twenty-five thousand dollars. Captain Wilmott, after a visit to the shipping line office, ordered the Morro Castledeck fire hydrants capped and sealed; 2100 feet of fire hose was locked away, along with nozzles, outlets, and wrenches for each length of hose. Whether the captain received positive instructions from an executive of the Ward Line, or whether he acted independently, is not known, nor is it important. What is known is that as a result of Wilmott’s order, the pride of the American merchant marine, one of the fastest and most luxurious liners afloat, became from that moment on, a floating fire hazard in all but its cargo holds. If a fire started in any of the passenger areas, the only pieces of equipment readily available to fight it were seventy-three half-gallon portable fire extinguishers and twenty-one carbon tetrachloride extinguishers.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Captain Robert Wilmott locked his cabin as soon as his visitor left. His worst fears had been confirmed by the Port of Havana chief of police, Captain Oscar Hernandez: Wilmott’s life and ship were threatened. Hernandez had warned the captain to be on the watch for a Communist agent. Evidently he had just received urgent information that the Cuban Communist Party wanted to sabotage the ship because she was aiding the lawful government, and had probably placed an agent on board. In Captain Wilmott he found a ready listener. When the master of the Morro Castle then recounted the details of the mysterious fire, poisoning attempt, and the strike threat, Oscar Hernandez pronounced them all “classic symptoms of the presence of Reds.” The captain accepted the police officer’s diagnosis as an obvious explanation of the inexplicable.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“On August 11, 1934, Stanley Ferson walked off the Morro Castle when she docked in New York. His sudden departure baffled Alagna and a number of ship’s officers; thirty-seven years would pass before the extraordinary circumstances behind Ferson’s resignation were revealed. With his departure, Rogers became chief radio officer, Alagna regained his old position as first assistant radioman, and Maki—absent during the furor—returned to complete the team. As far as Maki was concerned, “Rogers ran an easy shop. You did your job, and you relaxed the way you liked.” Alagna, on the other hand, found it difficult to relax. He had started to get “the creeps.” He believed somebody was trying to waylay him, possibly even kill him, for the trouble he had caused. “I thought several times that I heard footsteps hurrying along behind me in the shadows of the deck. But each time, when I swung around to investigate, the deck would be vacant. I could neither see nor hear anyone when I was sure someone had been there but a moment before.” It may have been this stress which finally sealed the fate of George Alagna. On this trip, one day out of New York, as the Morro Castle steamed through the Florida Strait on her way to Havana, Alagna had been on radio duty. Suddenly he raced to the bridge and accused the watch officer, Second Officer Ivan Freeman, of tinkering with the radio compass on the bridge, jamming the main radio transmitter. It was a ridiculous allegation; moreover, it offended Freeman’s sense of propriety. Junior radiomen did not come to the bridge unless it was with a specific message; they certainly did not assail the officer of the watch. Freeman complained to Chief Officer Warms, who reported the incident to the captain. Captain Wilmott sent a signal to the Radiomarine Corporation demanding the immediate removal of Alagna on their return to New York.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“On the afternoon of Saturday, August 4, 1934, Alagna approached a number of the crew and junior officers an hour before sailing time. He urged them to walk off. Clutching a copy of the Marine Workers’ Voice, the official organ of the Marine Workers International Union, the radioman tried to duplicate the success of the Diamond Cement’s crew. But by the time he had walked the length of the ship he had earned the enmity of Captain Wilmott and every senior officer. They looked on him as a saboteur, a dangerous radical willing to risk their livelihoods in an era when ships’ officers would sign on as watchmen to make a living. The deck crew was not much more sympathetic. Alagna’s conditions on board were undoubtedly better than theirs; most of them had nothing in common with the well-spoken college graduate and his talk of a confrontation with the men who paid their wages. The call to strike was a total failure. Captain Wilmott wanted to fire Alagna at once, but Ferson and Rogers intervened. They argued they could not work a constant radio watch between them. The Radiomarine Corporation said it was impossible to find a replacement at such short notice. So George Alagna was temporarily reprieved. But he was shunned by virtually all the officers and crew. The only exception was George White Rogers. The radio shack continued to be a center of ferment.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle

“Since 1903 American interests had exercised virtually complete control over Cuba’s political and economic affairs. For $2000 a year the United States rented military bases at Guantanamo and Bahia Horda. During this time, Americans did little to improve conditions for the local population. Statistics showed that in 1920, there was only one doctor for every 3000 people; a third of the population had intestinal parasites; the average per capita income was two dollars a month; six out of every ten rural children never went to school; 75 per cent of Cuba’s arable land was controlled by American companies; U.S. control in the telephone and electric services exceeded 90 per cent.”
― Gordon Thomas, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle