On June 15, 1904, she was chartered to run members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church to an annual church picnic at Locust Point on Long Island's North Shore. Some 1,358 members of Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), the tightly knit German immigrant community then surrounding Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side, boarded the ferry around nine that morning at a pier on Third Street and the East River. St. Mark's pastor, Reverend George Haas, and leaders of the church were with them on deck. The Times reported , "As she cast off and stood out into the stream her flags were flying, the band was playing a lively air, and her three decks were crowded to their capacity with a happy throng that looked for a pleasant day's outing at Locust Point, on the Sound." Most of passengers were women and children.
On board were captain, William van Schaick, and a crew of twenty-three men. Prior to this voyage he had an unblemished safety record.
Then disaster struck. Just as the General Slocum was passing Sunken Meadow at East 90th Street, adjacent to Randalls Island in the Hell Gate, which is almost under where the Triborough Bridge stands today, cries of "Fire!" broke out below. Smoke started billowing from a forward storage room. A spark, most likely from a carelessly tossed match, had ignited a barrel of straw. Several crewmen tried to put the fire out, but they had never conducted a fire drill or undergone any emergency training. To make matters worse, the ship's rotten fire hoses burst when the water was turned on.
By the time they notified Captain William Van Schaick of the emergency ‒ fully ten minutes after discovering the fire — the blaze raged out of control.
The captain looked to the piers along the East River, but feared he might touch off an explosion among the many oil tanks there. Instead, even as onlookers on the Manhattan shore shouted for him to dock the ship, he opted to proceed at top speed to North Brother Island a mile ahead. Several small boats followed the floating inferno as it roared upriver.
"I started to head for One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street, but was warned off by the captain of a tugboat, who shouted to me that the boat would set fire to the lumber yards and oil tanks there. Besides I knew that the shore was lined with rocks and the boat would founder if I put in there. I then fixed upon North Brother Island."
"It was only a matter of seconds until the entire forward part of the boat was a mass of flames," the Times reporters continued, and passengers began rushing madly over the three decks to avoid the flames, "All this time full speed ahead was maintained, and the flames, fanned fiercely by the wind, ate their way swiftly toward the hapless women and babies that were crowded on all the decks astern." The skipper looked out from his pilothouse and saw "a fierce blaze -- the wildest I have ever seen."
The increased speed fanned the flames. Panicked passengers ran about the deck, unsure where to take refuge. Mothers screamed for their children, husbands for their wives. The flames, accelerated by fresh coat of highly flammable paint, rapidly enveloped the ship and passengers began to jump overboard. Some clung to the rails as long as they could before jumping into the churning water. A few were rescued by nearby boats, but most did not know how to swim and simply drowned.
The inexperienced crew provided no help. Nor did the 3,000 life jackets on board. Rotten and filled with disintegrated cork, they had long since lost their buoyancy. Those who put them on sank as soon as they hit the water. Wired in place, none of the lifeboats could be dislodged. Even if they had, they would never have made it safely into the water with the ship chugging along at top speed.
While the fire raging completely out of control and decks already collapsing on terror-struck women and children, Captain Van Schaick, his own clothes on fire, stayed at the wheel and ran the Slocum up on the shore of the hospital island beyond the Hell Gate, but in a part of the river where the current remained extremely swift. As the captain remembered it, "I stuck to my post in the pilothouse until my cap caught fire. We were then about twenty-five feet off North Brother Island. She went on the beach, bow on, in about twenty-five feet of water. . . . Most of the people aft, where the fire raged fiercest, jumped in when we were in deep water, and were carried away. We had no chance to lower the lifeboats. They were burned before the crew could get at them."
North Brother Island became a scene of courage and panic.By the time the ship finally beached, it was almost completely engulfed in fire. Survivors poured over the railings into the water. Some huddled in the few places not yet reached by the flames, too terrified to jump. Nurses and patients at the island's contagious disease hospital rushed to offer assistance. Several of them grabbed ladders being used to renovate the facility and used them to bring the survivors off the ship. Others caught children tossed by distraught parents. Within minutes, all who could be saved, including the captain and several crew, were moved away from the burning hulk.
City Health Commissioner Darlington happened to be on the island that day, visiting the hospital. "I will never be able to forget the scene, the utter horror of it," he said. "The patients in the contagious wards, especially in the scarlet fever ward, went wild at things they saw from their windows and went screaming and beating at the doors until it took fifty nurses and doctors to quiet them. They were all locked up. Along the beach the boats were carrying in the living and dying and towing in the dead."
All told, 1,021 perished out of the original 1,358 who boarded the ship that morning. Most did not know how to swim, and the sawdust filled "life-vests" sank many of those fleeing the fire. Bodies washed up on the shores of the small channel islands of the East River.
But there were miracles. One little boy was thrown into the river in midstream clutching his stuffed toy dog. He was fished from the river unharmed, still clutching the prized dog.
Tales of heroism filled the newspaper accounts for days and weeks after the event.
A heroic captain ran his tug alongside the General Slocum in full exposure to the fire and saved over a hundred lives.
A measles patient from the island hospital ran into the water despite her fever and saved a few children.
A nurse who always wished she could swim ran into the river to grab some children, which she did again and again until she was swept into deeper water, where she discovered that she could swim and continued saving lives.
Still burning at its waterline, the General Slocum was carried off in the current for another thousand yards or so until it struck land at Hunts Point in the Bronx. It remained there, a burnt and partially sunken hull, for the next few weeks. Divers searched for bodies in its sunken remains. Police and rescue parties combed the riverbanks for miles in search of bodies.
The boats that followed seeking to offer assistance plucked a few survivors from the water. But mostly they found only the lifeless bodies of the ship's ill-fated passengers. The fact that most were young children only added to the horror.
Within minutes of the tragedy, reporters from the New York World and other major dailies were on the scene. The dispatches they sent back to their newsrooms sickened many a hardened editor. Rescue workers openly wept as the corpses piled up. By the time they were done counting the bodies and tabulating a list of the missing, the death toll stood at 1,021.
Nearly everyone in the neighborhood knew someone on the ship. As word of the fire spread, it caused panic and confusion. No one seemed to know where to go. Thousands gathered at St. Mark's Church awaiting word about survivors. Thousands more rushed uptown to the East 23rd Street pier designated as a temporary morgue. By mid-afternoon, those not yet reunited with their family members began to lose hope. Many discovered they had lost a wife or child. Dozens learned they had lost their entire families.
At the morgue policemen and Coroner's Department workers labored to lay out the hundreds of corpses as they arrived. Others were dispatched to scour the city for coffins. Wagons arrived laden with tons of ice for the preservation of the bodies. Outside hundreds of policemen strained to control the swelling crowds of relatives and friends, not to mention curiosity seekers, reporters, and undertakers.
The Times reported that on the night of June 14, 1904, "grief-crazed crowds" lined the shore where the bodies were being brought in by the boatload: "Scores were prevented from throwing themselves into the river."
For the next week, thousands paraded past the gruesome lineup of victims resting in open coffins. The better preserved were identified quickly. Some of the burned and disfigured were identified by their clothing or jewelry. The sixty-one that could not be identified ‒ including many of the bodies recovered days after the event — were buried in a common grave. Funerals were held every hour for days on end in the churches of Kleindeutschland. These tragic scenes were punctuated by the suicides of several men and women who lost their entire families in the fire.
Queens Police Ordered Out Large Force to Go to Lutheran Cemetery to Preserve Order
(Special to the Brooklyn Eagle, June 17, 1904)
All
the available policemen in Queens Borough, including those who are
entitled to the day off and such as are on vacation who can be reached
have been ordered to be present at Lutheran Cemetery, Middle Village,
tomorrow, when 200 funerals of victims of the Slocum disaster are to be
buried. The police are to be sent there to preserve order and prevent
attempts at robbery.The story of the General Slocum made headlines across the nation and around the globe. World leaders and European royalty sent money and letters of condolence to Mayor George B. McClellan and the people of St. Mark's. Funds poured in from private citizens and charitable groups from Rhode Island to California.
How could a tragedy of such magnitude occur within a few hundred yards of the shores of the nation's most modern city? In the weeks and months that followed the fire, an outraged public searched for answers and culprits. City officials vowed to conduct a thorough investigation and within weeks, Captain Van Schaick, executives of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Co., and the Inspector who certified the General Slocum as safe only a month before the fire were indicted.
Terrible weeks of recrimination, accusation, investigation, and trials followed the disaster. They addressed the reports of the rotten life jackets and fire hoses that burst under pressure. Some jackets were found to have been stuffed with metal to give them the regulation weight. The captain and crew were pilloried in the press, as were the ship's owners.
Captain Van Schaick came under the most intense scrutiny. Why had he failed to dock the ship immediately after discovering the fire? Why had he instead raced upriver and allowed the fire to claim more victims? Why was his crew so poorly trained? How was it that he survived when so many others perished?
At his trial Van Schaick offered explanations for his actions, but the jury was not convinced. He was convicted of criminal negligence and manslaughter and sentenced to ten years hard labor in the Sing Sing prison. He served three years before being pardoned by President William H. Taft. Free, he was a broken man- the horrible tragedy and subsequent legal action took their toll and he lived out his days in seclusion.
In contrast, the officials at the Knickerbocker Steamship Company got only a small fine, in spite of the fact that the trial revealed the company had illegally falsified records to cover up their lack of attention to passenger safety.
Kleindeutchland never recovered. The steady exodus of Germans to Yorkville had begun in the 1890s and now became a torrent. The German settlement moved uptown on the East Side overlooking the site of the disaster, and to Astoria in Queens. Seeking to escape painful memories, many moved away to outlying neighborhoods. By the time of the 1910 census, only a handful of German families remained in Kleindeutschland.
The General Slocum disaster brought about a major upgrading of steamboat safety regulations and a sweeping reform of the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS).
One week after the fire, President Theodore Roosevelt named a five-man commission to investigate the Slocum tragedy and recommend measures that would prevent an event like it from occurring again. The commission held hearings in New York and Washington, D. C. and took testimony from hundreds of witnesses and experts.
In October 1904 it issued a scathing report that placed most of the blame at the feet of the USSIS. Dozens were fired and a complete re-inspection of steamboats ordered. Not surprisingly, the new inspections turned up widespread safety problems, from useless lifejackets to rotten fire hoses. The result was a long list of recommended reforms, including requiring new steamboats be equipped with:
• fireproof metal bulkheads to contain fire
• steam pipes extended from the boiler into cargo areas (to act as a sprinkler)
• improved lifejackets (one for each passenger and crew member)
• fire hoses capable of handling 100 pounds of pressure per square inch
• accessible life boats
All were subsequently enacted, leading to dramatic improvements in steamboat safety.
The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks, and remains the worst maritime disaster in the city's history.
Remarkably, the Slocum tragedy rapidly faded from public memory, to the point that it was replaced as the city's GREAT fire just seven years later when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burned. The onset of World War I eradicated sympathy for anything German, including the innocent victims of the General Slocum fire. By the 1920s, as the Triangle fire became firmly entrenched in the American memory, all that remained of the General Slocum fire was a small, annual commemoration at the Lutheran cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.
The General Slocum disaster memorial in Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan, New York City, which was once in Little Germany.
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