PS General Slocum

The Vessel

The PS General Slocum was an American side-wheel paddle steamer, built at the Devine Burtis shipyard at Brooklyn, New York, in 1891 for the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. She was 80 metres long, 1,284 gross tons, and powered by a vertical-beam steam engine driving twin side paddle wheels. Her original employment was the New York City excursion trade: day-long charter cruises for church groups, fraternal societies, and Sunday school outings on the Hudson River, the East River, and the New Jersey coastal waters.

The ship had been named after Union Army General Henry Warner Slocum (1827-1894), a Civil War corps commander and subsequent New York Congressman. Her accommodation comprised three passenger decks with a combined capacity of approximately 2,500 passengers, plus a crew of 25-30. She was, at her commissioning in 1891, among the larger excursion steamers of the New York region and had been certified by the US Steamboat Inspection Service for Hudson River and New York harbour operations.

By June 1904 she was 13 years into commercial service. Her life-saving equipment had been renewed at various intervals: her 12 lifeboats, 10 inflatable life-rafts, and approximately 2,500 cork-filled life preservers had been installed at various dates between 1891 and 1904 under specific US Steamboat Inspection Service regulations. The life-saving equipment, and specifically the condition of the life preservers, would prove catastrophically inadequate on 15 June 1904.

Her master on her final voyage was Captain William van Schaick, 66, who had commanded General Slocum since her commissioning in 1891. Her complement on the final voyage was approximately 1,360 passengers (predominantly the St Mark's German Lutheran Church congregation of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, conducting their annual church picnic excursion) plus 30 crew, a total of approximately 1,390 aboard.

The Voyage

The voyage was the 17th annual church picnic of the St Mark's German Lutheran Church of East 6th Street, Manhattan. The congregation, predominantly first-generation and second-generation German immigrants from the Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany") neighbourhood of the Lower East Side, had chartered General Slocum for the day: a return excursion from the East 3rd Street pier on the East River to the Locust Grove picnic grounds at Eatons Neck, Long Island.

The passengers embarked at approximately 09:00 on 15 June 1904. The 1,360 aboard were predominantly women and children (the church men were typically at work on a Wednesday); approximately 70 per cent of the passengers were women and children, and approximately 40 per cent were under 18 years of age. The congregation had paid 50 cents per adult and 25 cents per child for the excursion; a church band was aboard, playing hymns and popular music; the weather was clear and warm.

General Slocum departed the East 3rd Street pier at approximately 09:30 and proceeded north up the East River towards the East River's confluence with Long Island Sound at the northern end of Manhattan. The standard route took the ship past Hell Gate (the narrow strait separating Wards Island from Queens), where the East River's tidal currents are notoriously difficult for navigation.

At approximately 10:00 on 15 June 1904, as General Slocum was approaching Hell Gate, a fire was detected in the forward cabin, in an area used for storage of paint, straw, and combustible ship's stores. The specific ignition source was never established with certainty; the subsequent investigation identified a discarded cigarette or a malfunctioning lamp as the most likely causes.

The Disaster

The fire spread with catastrophic speed through General Slocum. The specific material combinations in the forward cabin - straw, paint, oakum, paraffin - combined to produce an intense and rapidly-spreading fire that was not containable by the ship's standard fire-fighting equipment. The fire-hoses on the forward deck, when the crew attempted to activate them, were found to be rotten and inoperative; the pumps, when activated, delivered water at pressure insufficient to reach the fire location; and the life preservers, distributed frantically to the panicking passengers, disintegrated on contact with the water.

The life preservers were, it subsequently emerged, the single most damning failure of the disaster. The cork-filled life preservers aboard General Slocum had been purchased in 1891 at her commissioning and had never been replaced through the subsequent 13 years. The cork, which provided the life preservers' flotation, had substantially deteriorated over 13 years of storage; many of the preservers had been weighted with iron bars during the original 1891 inspection to bring them up to the statutory minimum weight of 6 pounds (the Steamboat Inspection Service weight specification was intended as a quality standard, but the weighting bars had been retained when the cork degraded). When passengers jumped into the water wearing the life preservers, the degraded cork provided no flotation, and the iron weights pulled the wearers underwater.

Captain van Schaick's decision, made within approximately four minutes of the fire's detection, was to continue the ship at full steam towards the nearest accessible beach - North Brother Island, approximately 1.5 kilometres ahead - rather than to stop and attempt orderly evacuation in mid-river. The decision was controversial: critics argued that stopping immediately would have allowed small boats from nearby shores to assist; van Schaick's defence was that the current at Hell Gate was too dangerous for effective rescue operations.

General Slocum burned for approximately 20 minutes at full steam, pushing her burning hulk northeast through Hell Gate towards North Brother Island. The ship grounded on the Bronx shore of North Brother Island at approximately 10:20 on 15 June 1904, burned to the waterline, and sank.

Of the approximately 1,390 aboard, approximately 1,021 died: burned to death in the cabins and decks, drowned in the East River wearing the failed life preservers, or crushed against the paddle wheel boxes in the panic. Approximately 325 survived. The 1,021 dead represented the worst loss of life in any disaster in New York City history until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The Legacy

The PS General Slocum disaster of 15 June 1904 was, at the time of its occurrence, the worst single-event loss of life in American history and the worst maritime disaster in American peacetime history. The 1,021 dead devastated the St Mark's Lutheran congregation and, by extension, the entire Kleindeutschland neighbourhood of the Lower East Side: hundreds of families lost multiple members, dozens lost every woman and child in the household, and the neighbourhood's cultural character was permanently altered. Within two years of the disaster, the surviving men of Kleindeutschland had substantially relocated to Yorkville on the Upper East Side; the specific German-immigrant character of the Lower East Side, which had defined the neighbourhood since the 1840s, came effectively to an end.

The subsequent federal investigation, conducted through the summer and autumn of 1904, established a comprehensive catalogue of regulatory failures: the rotten fire hoses, the deteriorated life preservers, the inoperative lifeboats, the inadequate crew training, and the systematic failures of the US Steamboat Inspection Service's enforcement regime. The specific individual prosecutions included: Captain van Schaick, convicted of criminal negligence and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment (the longest single-individual prison sentence in any American maritime disaster case); the Steamboat Inspection Service inspectors responsible for the 1891 and subsequent inspections, who were indicted but subsequently acquitted; and the officers of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, who faced civil proceedings but no criminal charges.

The specific regulatory response was the comprehensive reorganisation of the US Steamboat Inspection Service (eventually absorbed into the US Coast Guard in 1942), the revision of federal life-saving equipment specifications (the 1906 Steamboat Inspection Service Bulletin on life preserver materials specifically prohibited the use of weighted cork and established the testing protocols that formed the basis of modern marine life-preserver certification), and the development of the fire-hose maintenance standards that remained in force until the 1980s.

The cultural response was substantial and specific. The General Slocum disaster is referenced at length in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922); the 16 June 1904 date of the novel places its events on the day following the disaster. The All Souls Church at Manhattan, established by the bereaved St Mark's congregation, contains a specific memorial to the dead. The North Brother Island site remained a quarantine hospital through the 1940s; it is now a protected bird sanctuary in the East River.

The wreck of General Slocum was raised from North Brother Island in 1905 and converted to a coal barge; the converted barge was eventually sunk in a 1911 Atlantic gale off New Jersey. The 1,021 dead are commemorated by the General Slocum Memorial at Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan (dedicated 1906), and by individual memorial plaques at the sites of the destroyed Kleindeutschland family homes.