The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Never Again 1904

“These damn corporations,” President Theodore Roosevelt thundered, “are just a means of hiding.”

Attorney General Philander Knox contentedly puffed on his pipe while Roosevelt raged. He was used to the president’s mercurial temperament — in time he would calm and come to the point.

“They have all the benefits of man without the guidance of a conscience,” Roosevelt noted. “Trusts and corporations — they’ll bring this country down.”

Knox stared at the president. He was not a large man — five feet nine, 165 pounds — but he carried himself like a giant. At this instant, his face was flushed with anger, and the eyes behind his wire-framed spectacles were blazing. Roosevelt’s hair was dark and short and formed a small point near the center of his forehead. His hand was tugging the right side of his bushy mustache.

“I agree, sir,” Knox said.

“The Knickerbocker Steamboat Company,” Roosevelt said, “are just organized murderers.”

“Uh-huh,” Knox said.

“I want you and the secretary of commerce and labor to travel up to New York,” Roosevelt said, “and find the parties responsible for this disaster — then prosecute them.”

Knox glanced at the president. The color was seeping from his cheeks as he calmed down. He watched as Roosevelt sipped from a glass of water.

“Mr. President,” Knox said evenly, “I think that would fall under New York State jurisdiction.”

Roosevelt spit a partial mouthful of water across the desk. “We are the federal government,” he said loudly. “We’re in charge here.”

“Very good,” Knox said, rising from his seat in the Oval Office. “I’ll contact the secretary and make arrangements to leave tomorrow.”

“Philander?” Roosevelt said, as the attorney general opened the door to the office.

“Yes, sir,” Knox said easily.

“Knock some heads up there for me,” Roosevelt said, smiling.

“As you wish, sir,” Knox said.

Captain William Van Schaick leaned against the chart desk and scratched the date into General Slocum’s log. Thursday came with overcast skies and light rain, with the temperature hovering around eighty degrees. Toward Long Island, Van Schaick noticed the sun peering from the clouds — once the haze burned off, it should be a fine day.

Van Schaick was tall and lanky, six feet tall, 170 pounds. His blue uniform was clean and pressed but faded some. The gold braid around his armpits was showing signs of tarnish. The fresh white flower stuck in his lapel appeared slightly out of place — like a new saddle on an aged horse.

His employer, the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, continued to cut costs, and lately Van Schaick had been thinking more and more about transferring to another line. Few, if any, of his deckhands had experience — in fact, their primary skill seemed to be the ability to work for slave wages — and General Slocum itself needed work that the company seemed unwilling or unable to afford.

Turning on his heel to glance from the window, Van Schaick felt a softness in the deck that signified rot. He turned back and noted this in the log.

Reverend George Haas stood on the Third Street pier and stared up at the ship. The graceful twin-decked excursion boat was finished in white both above and below and seemed easily capable of carrying the thousand plus passengers that had signed up for the trip. As pastor of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Haas presided over a congregation of mainly German immigrants that numbered nearly two thousand. Today was to be an outing for the Sunday school students and whatever parents could attend. The trip was scheduled to take them from the Third Street pier to Locust Grove on Long Island for a day of picnicking and fun. Haas smiled as the band began to play Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Haas had no way to know the horror he would soon experience.

Thirteen-year-old John Tischner stared at the coins in his hand as he stood in the line at the refreshment stand aboard ship. The fried clams smelled good, but Tischner’s mother had packed him a tin pail with a pair of liverwurst-and-onion sandwiches for the noon meal along with a slice of chocolate cake for dessert. The pulled taffy held his interest for a time, but by the time he reached the head of the line, he had settled on a scoop of strawberry ice cream. It was a strange choice at 9:25 in the morning, but it was a day of celebration. He handed the man at the counter a few coins, then received his change and the ice cream. Enough for another scoop on the return trip.

Things were looking up.

Van Schaick ordered the whistle to blow, signaling five minutes until they shoved off, then called down to the engine room to order steam. General Slocum was built in Brooklyn in 1891 and measured 263 feet with a 38-foot beam.

Powered by a single vertical-beam engine constructed by W. A. Fletcher Company, she was supplied steam by a pair of boilers fueled with coal. A pair of sidewheel paddles with the name of the vessel in ornamental letters on the outside propelled her. Twin stacks vented the smoke into the air. Strung along the upper deck on each side were a half-dozen lifeboats on davits. The paint on the lifeboats was chipped and flaking. Originally finished with a white hull and a hardwood finish on the upper decks, the ship had been repainted with a white-on-white motif that was now showing stains from hard use. Still, all in all, she was a graceful vessel.

“Hurry,” Henry Ida said to his sweetheart, Amelia Swartz, “they’re leaving.”

Swartz increased her pace along the pier, but it was difficult-her dress boots were laced tight, and the boned corset pinching her waist made deep breaths almost impossible. Twirling her parasol, she made her way to the gangplank. Ida was overdressed for summer, but he had little choice — he owned only two suits, both wool. His only concession to the heat had been to leave the vest at home. Pushing‘the straw boater back on his forehead, he switched the wicker lunch hamper to his other hand and started up the ramp. In three minutes, General Slocum would pull from the pier. Forging through the crowd, he found a spot for them on deck.

Darrell Millet pried the top off a wooden barrel containing glasses packed in straw. The head steward needed the glassware at the aft refreshment stand immediately. Filling his fingers with the glasses, he made his way aft. Six trips later, the barrel was empty, and he dragged it to the forward storeroom. Finding a spot amid the paint pots and oil lamps, he balanced it on a couple of overturned pails, then shut the door. The straw was dry and smelled of the prairie.

Captain Van Schaick blew the whistle one last time, then ordered the gangplank retracted. Calling down to the engine room for steam, he placed the drives in forward and steered General Slocum from the pier. More than one thousand passengers were now under his care. The band began to play “Nearer My God to Thee.”

PORTER WALTER PAYNE entered the crowded storeroom. Making his way to a workbench, he began to fill a pair of oil lamps. Suddenly the ship rolled from side to side from the wake of a passing barge. Payne spilled some of the fuel onto the floor. After finishing the fueling, he twisted the metal caps back on the lamps. Carrying them over near the door, he paused to light a match out of the wind. Touching the match to the wicks, he tossed the match over his shoulder, then adjusted the flames. With a lit lamp in each hand, he walked onto the deck, then aft.

Paint fumes and spilled fuel were the recipe for disaster. The burning ember from the tossed match was little more than the size of a pencil lead, but it was enough. The fumes from the paint hung low over the floor, mixing with the smell from the spilled fuel. The gas ignited with a fuzzy blue flame. At just that instant, General Slocum hit the second set of wakes from the barge. As the ship rocked from side to side, the precariously placed barrel tipped forward and spilled the straw into the almost extinguished fire. Red and yellow points of fire streaked skyward.

Captain Van Schaick was staring forward when he saw a puff of smoke from a porthole in the forward storeroom.

“Fire,” he shouted.

Then he ordered his second in command, Marcus Anthony, to round up a few sailors to man the hoses. They were five minutes from Hell’s Gate.

Reverend Haas was ladling clam chowder into bowls for his young parishioners when a sailor ran past, tugging a rubber fire hose. He prayed the man was just going forward to wash the deck, but deep in his heart he knew different. Turning his head from side to side, he tried to locate where the life jackets were stored.

“My command for an experienced sailor,” Van Schaick shouted.

His employer had saddled him with a crew consisting of untrained day laborers and general miscreants, and it was little wonder. The economy was in high gear, and unemployment was at its lowest level in twenty years. To compound the problem, just two months before, the United States had taken possession of Panama, and many able-bodied seamen had headed south for the higher wages. Workers were hard to come by, and the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company was not noted for paying high wages. Van Schaick looked down to the deck — it was chaos. He watched as one of his deckhands strapped on a life vest and jumped over the side.

“Turn on the water,” Anthony yelled back.

The forward storeroom was completely ablaze. At that precise instant, the cans of paint exploded and blew the door to splinters. Deckhand Brad Creighton twisted the brass knob that fed water from the pumps in the lower hold to the fire hoses. He watched as the rubber hose expanded and filled. Halfway down the deck, along the outer walkway, the aged rubber burst. The broken end of the hose began to flail around the deck like the body of a severed snake.

Henry Ida broke the rusted lock off the locker containing the life jackets and began to hand them but to the passengers. The canvas on the vests was old and moth-eaten, and several of the jackets burst open as soon as he grabbed them. Rotted cork littered the floor. Helping Amelia into a jacket, Ida tried to tie the straps to hold it tight. The straps broke off in his hands.

“If we have to go into the water,” Ida shouted amid the growing pandemonium, “you will have to hold the vest on.”

Amelia Swartz nodded. Her face plainly showed the fear she was feeling.

“If we become separated,” Ida said, “just swim for shore. I’ll meet you there.”

“Form a bucket brigade,” Marcus Anthony shouted, “and hook another hose to the spigot.”

This was day laborer Paul Endicott’s first day on the water. His trade was that of an apprentice cobbler, but times were so good that people were purchasing new shoes instead of having the old ones repaired. His work was slow and he needed money, so he’d signed on for a day of work.

“Where are the buckets?” Endicott asked Anthony.

“Damn,” Anthony said loudly, “they’re in the forward storeroom.”

“What should I do?” Endicott asked.

“Climb up to the pilothouse and explain our problems to the captain,” Anthony said. “Ask him to make his way to shore.”

It was bad, and Reverend Haas knew this. The fire had spread to the bow deck, and with the ship still moving forward, the flames were being fanned backward onto the mid and rear decks. All around him there was confusion — he watched as another hose was hooked to the spigot. This one burst only feet from the knob. The life vests Haas had been able to secure were rotted and deteriorating. Even so, with help from a few of the other adults, he strapped in the children and tried to line them up on the rear deck.

“We’ll try to make North Brother Island,” Van Schaick said, after Endicott’s report, “and run her aground.”

North Brother Island was three miles away.

“Full steam,” Van Schaick shouted down to the engine room.

With smoke and embers flying from her bow, General Slocum raced upriver.

Captain McGovern was on his dredge boat Chelsea. He looked up as General Slocum steamed past at full speed, trailing smoke. He watched the decks as a mass of people ran aft. They piled up along the wooden railing until it gave way and nearly a hundred passengers were pitched into the water. Making his way down to his steam-powered launch Mosquito, McGovern headed to the site to try to rescue those swimming.

At the bathhouse at 134th Street and the East River, Helmut Gilbey had just settled into a wooden Andirondack chair for a day of fresh air and sunshine. Seeing the burning steamer running upriver, he ran out to the street and flagged down the first police officer who happened past.

“There’s a steamer burning on the river,” he said breathlessly.

Michael O’Shaunassey looked between the buildings and caught a glimpse of General Slocum. Racing down the street to the precinct house, he sounded the alarm.

The precinct house emptied as the police fanned out in search of boats.

Boats were dispatched from the Seawanhaka Boat Club and the Knickerbocker Yacht Club while the police boats of the Twelfth Street substation were readied. Within minutes, the fireboat Zophar Mills and the Health Department’s tug Franklin Edson pulled from their docks and chased after the burning steamer. At the same time, two nearby ferryboats diverted from their runs to comb the waters for survivors.

Van Schaick was captain of a dying ship. His crew’s inexperience, combined with the shoddy fire hoses and a myriad of other problems, had proved to be General Slocum’s undoing. His decision to run at full speed for North Brother Island had not helped matters any — the winds had fanned the flames into a near maelstrom. Followed by two dozen boats, Van Schaick ran his command hard aground.

John Tischner was trembling. His day of fun and frivolity had turned into a horror that his young mind could not comprehend. Tears streaked down his face as he tugged at the straps on his rotting life vest. At that instant the ship’s keel struck earth, and Tischner was tossed to the deck. Peering up, he could see that the paddle wheels were still spinning wildly. Crawling through the legs of the panic-stricken adults, he made his way to where the railing had broken away and rolled into the water. As soon as the life vest met water, it became waterlogged and pulled him under.

The shock of running aground collapsed part of the hurricane deck, spilling nearly a hundred passengers directly into the center of the fire. Their screams grew loud as their flesh was burned from their bones. Several passengers were tossed directly atop the spinning paddle wheels, where their bodies were battered, then pulled under.

Reverend Haas managed to toss nearly eighty of the younger children into the water before a burning timber from the upper deck slammed into his shoulder and brought him to his knees. Hair on fire, he tried to roll off the deck but was sucked under by the paddle wheels.

“Amelia,” Ida shouted, “Amelia.”

But there was no answer.

Ida had no way to know this, but Amelia Swartz had leapt from the burning ship a mile back. At this instant, Captain McGovern on Mosquito was fishing her from the water, more dead than alive. Racing aft while shouting her name, Ida stepped upon a section of smoldering deck that gave way underfoot. Falling through up to his shoulders, Ida struggled to climb back out again.

Nurse Agnes Livingston paused just outside the main doors to the Municipal Hospital on North Brother Island. She watched as a man, his hat ablaze, crept from the small house at the highest point of the burning ship. The man climbed over the railing, then dived into the water. Livingston had no way to know that Captain Van Schaick had abandoned ship.

“Let’s go,” Dr. Todd Kacynski shouted, as he raced out of the hospital.

Livingston followed Kacynski to the shoreline. A nurse hardened by years of service, she was conditioned to blood and gore. Still, the sight of blackened and burned bodies washing up on shore sickened her. Walking a few feet away, she vomited into a bush, then tidied her white hat and headed back into the fray.

Big Jim Wade steered his tug Easy Times toward the burning excursion boat. What he saw was a horrific sight. The top deck had collapsed into the center of the vessel, and the additional fuel stoked the fires. Flames shot skyward with a column of dirty black smoke. The paddle wheels had stopped spinning, and several people were clutching the wooden paddles in an effort to stay clear of the flames. Wade approached along the starboard side. He could see large sections of railing that had given way under the crush of passengers, and pockets of people clustered fore and aft.

Without thought of the danger, he eased Easy Times alongside the burning hull.

Back in the city, a reporter with the Tribune called his office from police headquarters. “The excursion boat General Slocum, carrying a Sunday school group, is ablaze in the East River. Casualties will be high,” he finished.

The Tribune editor arranged for photographers and reporters to be sent to the scene.

Mayor McClellan paced the floors of his office in City Hall. “The police commissioner reports that he has sent all his available men to the scene,” he said to his aide. “Make sure the fire chief is pulling out all the stops, as well.”

The man started for the door.

“What’s the number for City Hospital?” McClellan shouted at the retreating man.

“Gotham 621,” the man shouted back.

McClellan reached for the telephone.

“This is the mayor,” he shouted into the phone. “Give me the head of operations.”

“Pull them across,” Wade shouted to his deckhands out of the window of the pilothouse, “then send them aft.”

Glancing toward the transom, Wade could see several blackened bodies floating close to his propellers. There was nothing he could do — he needed propulsion to stay close to the steamer and to be ready to back away at a moment’s notice. He watched as a corpse swirled in the propellers’ whirlpool, then was sucked under and shredded.

He turned back to the bow.

“Get them off there,” he screamed.

Little Germany on the Lower East Side was in chaos. Relatives of the passengers on General Slocum jammed the elevated train platforms from Fourteenth Street to First Street in an effort to board an uptown train. Rumors ran through the crowd as the tension grew. Outside St. Mark’s Church, a crowd grew large. Parents with tearstained faces awaited word of a miracle that would never come.

The captain of Zophar Mills was directing a stream of water at the burning center of General Slocum. The visible flames were gone, but the wreckage was still smoldering. The water around his fireboat was littered with the corpses of adults and children. His crew had managed to pluck nearly thirty people from the water, and they huddled on the stem deck like refugees from a violent war.

At that instant, a rumbling was heard from General Slocum, and the ship rolled to one side.

Nurse Livingston had grown numb to the suffering. The shore of North Brother Island looked like a battlefield. She no longer heard the moans of the dying — the screams of the burned and injured were much louder. Dr. Kacynski had administered the fifty doses of morphine he had brought along.

“Nurse Livingston,” he shouted over the screams, “return to the pharmacy. I need all the stores of pain medication we have available.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Livingston said.

She began jogging toward the hospital, momentarily free from the horrors.

Wade had done all he could. General Slocum was awash, only one side of the paddle wheel and a portion of the fore deck above water. Backing away from the wreckage, he turned Easy Times ninety degrees and set off for New York City with his load of sick and injured.

The hospital on North Brother Island was filled to overflowing.

“At least five hundred, maybe a thousand,” Alderman John Dougherty reported over the telephone to Mayor McClellan.

“Good Lord,” McClellan exclaimed, “maybe there will be more survivors.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Dougherty said. “The steamer is awash.”

“I want you to find the commander of Engine Company 35,” McClellan said.

“The fire on board is out, sir,” Dougherty said.

“I know, John,” McClellan said wearily. “I want the firemen to help the coroner to identify the bodies.”

“Yes, sir,” Dougherty said.

“I’ll send some boats across to bring the bodies back to the pier at East Twenty-sixth Street,” McClellan said. “The families of the deceased can retrieve the bodies there.”

On the East River, New York City police boats were dragging the river for bodies. By seven that evening, they had retrieved more than two hundred. It was dark when the coroner stood over another blackened body.

“Check the pockets,” he said to a fireman.

The man rolled the body over and removed a soggy leather wallet from the pocket.

“George Pullman,” the fireman said, as he stared at the name on a library card, “and there’s a check here for $300 made out to the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company.”

The coroner nodded. “I knew George,” he said quietly. “He was the treasurer of the St. Mark’s Sunday School.”

The fireman nodded.

“At least these bastards never got paid,” the coroner said angrily.

General Slocum’s hold still held some air, and the ship was drifting on the current. After traveling a short distance, the hulk grounded off Hunt’s Point. A diver was sent down into the hull. He found nearly a dozen bodies trapped in the wreckage. He brought them to the surface one by one.

The last was a lad nine years old who was clutching a prayer book in his hands.

As soon as the heavy dive helmet was removed, the diver burst into sobs. As his boat made its way back to the city, the diver sat on the stem deck, alone with his thoughts. General Slocum was his last dive ever.

Joe Flarethy, a lieutenant with the New York City Police Department, stared at the man on the stretcher at the hospital on North Brother Island with barely concealed disgust. The man’s leg had been fractured when he’d leapt from General Slocum.

“I understand you’re Captain Van Schaick,” Flarethy spat.

“I am,” Van Schaick said.

“You’re under arrest by order of the mayor,” Flarethy said. “Now, why don’t you make it easy on us and point out the rest of your crew?”

Van Schaick raised himself up on his elbows. “I’m the captain,” he said. “I’m responsible. You want to identify the crew, you do it yourself.”

Flarethy turned to the sergeant at his side. “Go bed to bed and ask the patients for identification. The seamen should have papers. Anyone that doesn’t — tag their toe and we’ll sort through them later.”

He turned back to Van Schaick.

“A real hero, aren’t you? Trying to protect your crew.” Flarethy pointed out the window toward the river. “The time to be a hero was out there.”

Van Schaick said nothing.

“Cuff this son of a bitch,” Flarethy said to a patrolman standing nearby.

“The Twenty-Sixth Street morgue is full,” Mayor McClellan said over the telephone to Dougherty. “We can’t take any more bodies.”

“Hold on,” Dougherty said.

McClellan heard snippets of conversation as Dougherty spoke to someone nearby.

“Okay, sir,” he said after a few moments, “there’s an abandoned coal shed just to the side of the hospital we can use as a makeshift morgue.”

“Excellent,” McClellan said.

“There’s just one thing,” Dougherty said.

“What’s that?” McClellan asked.

“We’ll need another boatload of ice to chill the bodies.”

“I’ll have it sent over immediately.”

There was a dim electric light illuminating the Twenty-sixth Street Pier as the first load of coffins was unloaded from the boats. Ice had been placed in the coffins to keep the bodies from decomposing, and as it melted it ran through the cracks in the wood and stained the street. Hundreds of ashen-faced parents had gathered to see if they could locate their missing children. A few survivors straggled off the boats. Most were half-dressed or slightly injured in some way. Almost all were adults. They hung their heads in shame.

Halfway up a ladder, in the center of the crowd, was a fireman from Engine Company Number 35. As the 432 caskets were carried past, he shouted out the names of the dead that had been identified. The wails from mourning parents filled the area around the pier. Those that had not been identified were stacked in neat rows waiting for space to open up at the morgue.

The morning following the disaster dawned clear and warm. Throughout New York City, flags flew at half-mast. At City Hall, Mayor McClellan learned that bodies were still washing up on the banks of the East River. He made the arrangements for collection and burial, then turned his attention to preventing another such disaster. First, he instituted a free “Learn to Swim” program. Second, he ordered all excursion boats in New York Harbor to cease operations until the vessels were checked and approved. Third, he began a full-scale investigation into the General Slocum tragedy.

When the final count was tallied, 1,021 passengers had perished.

But General Slocum was not finished.

Diver Jackson Hall stood on the side of the hull above water and shouted across the water to the captain of the salvage ship Francis Ann. He had spent the last hour inspecting the hull, which was resting on the bottom of the East River off Hunt’s Point.

“You can pick me up now,” Hall shouted across the water.

“How’s she look?” the captain shouted back.

“She can be raised,” Hall said. “The lower hull is intact — it’s the upper decks that sustained the most damage.”

“What’s she look like inside?” the captain questioned.

“Lots of blackened wood is piled in the center,” Hall said. “I was nearly hung up twice. The boilers appeared intact but bent. The port paddle wheel is shredded from the weight of the hulk pressing down.”

“What’s the surface like below the hulk?”

“It felt like soft mud,” Hall noted.

“Then we can get straps under the hull,” the captain said.

“Yes, sir,” Hall said.

“Then we’ll come alongside to pick you up,” the captain said, as he walked back toward the pilothouse.

“Good,” Hall muttered under his breath.

His inspection of General Slocum had made him uneasy. Ghosts of a thousand souls seemed to inhabit the inner sanctum he had entered. Twice he had thought he felt arms grab for him. Once he had caught sight of what he thought was an apparition out of the comer of his faceplate. When he turned his head and glanced through the murky water, he’d realized that it was part of a canvas top covering flapping in the current. Still, Hall had been spooked. He finished his inspection in record time.

Three weeks later, General Slocum was above water once again. The burned hulk was towed to a shipyard in New Jersey, where the top decks were razed and the wreckage in the hull removed and scrapped. Over the next few weeks, the hull was converted into a barge and rechristened Maryland.

She, too, would meet with an inglorious end.

The coast off the eastern seaboard of the United States can be a dangerous place when the winds of winter whip the surface of the sea. Captain Tebo Mallick of the towboat Gestimaine was a salty dog. Thirty-seven of his fifty years on the planet had been spent at sea, and he’d learned to read the signs on the water like they were lit with spotlights. Tonight, the sea off Atlantic City, New Jersey, was no place for man nor ship. Towering waves were rolling from east to west, the tops frosted with foamy white. Sheets of cold rain rattled the pilothouse windows like sand shot from a cannon. He stared toward land.

“I can barely see the lighthouse,” he said to a cat that lay atop the chart desk.

Then he swiveled and tried to look astern. Somewhere in the fog, a hundred yards to the rear and attached to his ship by a thick hemp line, was a barge loaded with furnace coke named Maryland. At just that second, a wave broke over his bow as the door to the pilothouse opened. The light from the brass fuel oil lamp hanging from the ceiling flickered and almost went out.

“I think the barge is taking on water,” deckhand Frank Terbill shouted.

Mallick twisted the wheel of Francis Ann as the weight from the barge pulled his stern toward the waves.

“She’s been porpoising for the last half hour,” Mallick said. “I was hoping the seas would calm some.”

Mallick felt his engine surge as the line connecting Maryland to his stern slackened.

“She’s going to whipsaw,” Mallick managed to shout to Terbill, before a wave hit Francis Ann broadside and threw them both against the bulkhead.

Then one of the lines connecting them to Maryland parted. It whipped over the pilothouse like an angry snake and snapped against the windshield. Francis Ann was pulled to port as the weight shifted and Mallick struggled to keep her from facing abeam to the mounting waves. Grabbing an ax mounted on the wall, he handed it to Terbill.

“Cut that bitch loose,” he shouted, “or we’re going in.”

Terbill raced to the stem deck and raised the ax over his head. Then he swung with all the force he possessed. The blade parted the line and embedded itself in the gunwale. In the fog, no one witnessed Maryland go under.

II Coke Isn’t Necessarily a Soft Drink 1994, 2000

In 1987, Bob Fleming, my old friend and researcher, sent me a report from the Army Corps of Engineers on the sinking and later demolition of a barge called the Maryland. At first I failed to see the significance of a lost barge, but then he called me on the phone and explained that Maryland was the ill-fated excursion steamboat General Slocum that had burned in New York’s East River in the summer of 1904 with horrible loss of life.

Sometime after the burned-out hulk had grounded on Brother’s Island in the East River, she was raised and towed to a shipyard. With her hull still sound below the waterline, General Slocum was sold for $70,000 by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company for use as a coal barge and renamed Maryland.

Six years later, while hauling a cargo of furnace coke and being pulled by the tug Asher J. Hudson from Camden to Newark, New Jersey, her hull began to leak. With a gale blowing and seas rising, the tug captain, Robert Moon, knew Maryland could not stay afloat. He removed his crew from the barge and cut her loose.

For the final time, General Slocum/Maryland slipped into the sea.

Upon hearing of her sinking, Maryland’s owner, Peter Hagen, celebrated. Not only would marine insurance cover the loss, but he was glad she was off his hands. In his mind, the vessel was cursed. She was always tied up for repairs, and before she made her last trip he was forced to add to her expense by replacing her rudder.

“Ill fortune always followed the Slocum,” said Hagen. “She was always getting into trouble. I’m glad she’s gone.”

The 1912 annual report of the Chief of Engineers of the Army Corps stated:

Another Corps report stated that the wreck was standing fifteen feet off the bottom in a water depth of twenty-four feet — thus the concern over her endangering other passing ships.

Finding General Slocum, a.k.a. Maryland, sounded like a piece of cake, right? The initial thinking was that the wreck would lie exposed on the bottom and that a sidescan sonar would have a relatively easy time locating it. Thus, all we had to do was merely sail a mile off Corson’s Inlet, cruise around for twenty minutes, and shout “Eureka!” Right?

Ho, ho, ho.

In September of 1994, Ralph Wilbanks and Wes Hall had finished a survey job in New York, so I asked them to try for General Slocum on their way home to the Carolinas. They launched Ralph’s survey boat Diversity and spent two days mowing the lawn outside Corson’s Inlet with a sidescan sonar.

A thorough search of the seafloor turned up nothing. The sonar read only a flat sandy bottom.

Now it was time to get back to the archival research. Different pieces of information began filtering in. One mention of the wreck put it two miles off the Ludlum Beach Lifeguard Station. Divers up and down the Jersey coast claimed to have dived on Maryland, but they all described intact remains that looked to them like a barge.

Two different targets were provided by Gene Patterson of Atlantic Divers at Egg Harbor Township. One turned out to be an old steamship, and another was probably the anchor and chain of the wreck, since the anomaly was spread out in the same vicinity. Gene also offered another target, but it was more than five miles off Corson’s Inlet.

Steve Nagiweiz, executive director of the Explorers Club, sent a set of coordinates he thought was General Slocum. Steve’s target was also too far off the inlet to be the wreck. Both Gene’s and Steve’s wrecks were found at a water depth between forty and fifty feet. According to the Army Corps’s indicated depth of twenty-four feet off Corson’s Inlet, they were both too deep.

Local divers who were interviewed all said they were expecting the remains of the wreck to be intact and have the appearance of a barge. None was aware of the Army Corps reports, nor did it occur to them that the wreck might be buried.

In late September of 2000, Ralph and Shea McLean set up headquarters in Sea Isle, New Jersey, for the second attempt to find General Slocum/Maryland. Not taking any chances, they expanded the search grid from the old Ludlum Beach Lighthouse beyond Corson’s Inlet. They began a mile and a half from the shore and worked in, running search lanes parallel to the beach. Ralph expected that the target, when they passed over it, would have the characteristics of a shattered wreck with scattered remains. This would be in keeping with the Army Corps account of the General Slocum/Maryland being blasted nearly level to the seabed.

The search now turned to targets that did not protrude or reach to the surface. It stood to reason that, if the barge was flattened by explosives as a menace to navigation, there was a better-than-even chance she had worked her way into the bottom silt.

The survey was conducted by towing the sensor of a Geo-metrics cesium magnetometer. Ralph was looking for a magnetic signature that would indicate iron hardware and pins in the original hull. There would be no huge mass, because the engine and boilers had been removed after the tragic fire. The clincher would be the fragments of the coke she was carrying when she sank.

Several small targets were located, but none had the criteria that fit the barge. Eventually, one magnetic anomaly looked promising. Just to be certain, Ralph and Shea continued running their hundred-foot search lanes until they were satisfied there were no other targets that matched the predicted signature. Satisfied that their main target filled the bill, they spent the next three days dredging in the sand; exposing large timbers, many splintered as if ripped apart, and many scattered fragments that resembled coke.

The last day was spent in performing a magnetic contour of the site. This contour process gave them a rough measurement of the wreckage that worked out to 217 feet by 38 feet, nearly the same known dimensions of General Slocum after she was refitted as the barge Maryland. The site was three miles north of the Ludlum Beach Lighthouse and one mile off Corson’s Inlet, right where the Army Corps of Engineers said it would be.

After returning to Charleston, Ralph took the pieces of what he’d recovered and believed was coke to a gemologist and four professors from the local college. They all agreed that it was indeed coke.

The curtain was drawn on the final act of General Slocum. It was almost as if she’d served penance for that horrible holocaust on a warm summer day in June 1904. Perhaps it was fitting that the once-beautiful ship, the pride of the New York excursion lines, with her glory days far behind her, became a stripped-down barge that was banished to roam the seas for another six years, carrying residue from steel furnaces.

She is still remembered in New York City when descendants of the victims gather at the memorial services held on the anniversary of the disaster at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Middle Village, Queens. Sixty-one victims are buried in the nearby church cemetery near a beautiful twenty-foot-high memorial statue.

At the last service, two of the only known survivors still living were present.