Friday, July 23, 2021 – YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE ON THE HIGH SEAS TO BE IN PERIL
FRIDAY, JULY 23, 2021
The
423rd Edition
EAST RIVER
MARITIME
DISASTERS
STEPHEN BLANK
East River Maritime Disasters
Stephen Blank
OK. By popular demand, one more – but only one more – East River ship story.
How about East River Maritime disasters? Turns out the East River has been a pretty dangerous place. Many serious shipping accidents have occurred in this short non-river (tidal estuary, to be precise).
The most famous was the terrible General Slocum fire in 1904. Most of us have heard the name but don’t really know much about it.
General Slocum was a triple-decker wooden side paddler that took folks on excursions around New York City. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the ship was chartered for $350 by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Church’s parish drew on German immigrants in the Lower East Side and East Village (then known as “Little Germany”). This was the trip’s 17th consecutive year, during a period when German settlers moved out of Little Germany for the Upper East and West Sides. Almost 1,400 passengers, mostly women and children (fewer than 150 were adult males) boarded General Slocum, which was to sail up the East River and then across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in Eatons Neck, Long Island.
But the steamboat caught fire and sank. In just 20 minutes, more than 1,000 people died. Prior to 9-11, the burning of the General Slocum had the highest death toll of any disaster in New York City history. It is the worst maritime disaster in the city’s history, and the second worst maritime disaster on United States waterways.
The excursion boat General Slocum lies beached off North Brother Island New York City’s East River, following a fire and resulting panic. The disaster cost the lives of 1,030 mostly German immigrants, June 15, 1904. (AP)
It was a preventable disaster. The crew was inexperienced and never conducted a fire drill. Some passengers jumped overboard but most of the ship’s lifejackets proved worthless because the cork then used for buoyancy, had turned to dust. Even worse, investigations discovered that Nonpareil Cork Works, supplier of cork for the life preservers, had placed 8 once iron bars inside the cork materials to meet minimum content requirements (6 pounds of “good cork” for each lifejacket) at the time. As the ship raced to shallow water the crew tried to fight the blaze, but the elderly fire hoses burst under the pressure. The Captain decided to continue his course rather than run the ship aground or stop at a nearby landing. By going into headwinds and failing to immediately ground the ship, he fanned the fire and promoted its spread from fore to aft. And he jumped ship as soon as he could. ‘
The Slocum disaster may have been the worst on the East River. But there were more.
The steamship caught fire just as it was in Hell Gate, the turbulent waters north of Blackwell’s (Roosevelt) Island, a particularly wicked part of the East River. Many tales have been told about the hundreds – even thousands – of ships sunk or damaged making this treacherous passage.
Indeed, histories repeat the same refrain: “Hundreds of ships have sunk into Hell Gate” “By the 1850s, one in fifty ships passing through the Hell Gate were either damaged or sunk—an annual average of 1,000 ships ran aground in the strait.” This is found again and again in the literature.
No less interesting than this Hell Gate horror story is the finding that while this liturgy is often repeated, evidence of these many maritime calamities never appears. (Where sources are indicated – rarely – they quote each other.) A thousand ships a year run aground just north of our island?? Why the north end of our island should have been littered in wreckage and bodies. The picture that these tales create was well captured by this dramatic painting of chaos in Hell Gate. (So many ships are waiting to run the gauntlet!) I suspect the reality of the numbers is as true as the reality of this image.
However, we know of one famous victim of Hell Gate, H.M.S. Hussar. She was a 28-gun, 6th-rate, Mermaid Class Frigate of the British Royal Navy with a crew of over one hundred. Built in 1763, the ship fought in sea battles off the coasts of Ireland and Portugal before being dispatched to New York in November 1780 to fight the colonists.
On 23 November 1780, against his pilot’s better judgment, Hussar’s captain decided to sail from the East River through the treacherous waters of Hell Gate between Randall’s Island and Astoria. Just before reaching Long Island Sound, Hussar was swept onto Pot Rock and began sinking. Pole was unable to run her aground and she sank in 96 feet of water.
What makes this loss of a relatively minor ship so interesting is that the British army’s payroll was to be moved to Gardiners Bay – aboard, of course, H.M.S. Hussar. The Brits owed a lot of back pay to its soldiers, and Hussar arrived in Manhattan with wages and 70 American prisoners of war. The exact amount is under dispute, but some say it might have been 960,000 British pounds in gold, worth roughly $576 million at the time. Various accounts of the tragedy emerged, but the British immediately denied that any payroll of gold guineas or sterling silver was consigned on the voyage. The survivors never mentioned a valuable cargo, nor was there any listed on the cargo manifest. The best bet is that the gold and silver was offloaded before the accident. The Brits denied the payroll delivery, but were suspect when they conducted extensive salvage efforts.
Occasional efforts are still made to find the treasure on the bottom of Hell Gate. A NY Times reporter in 2013 wrote, “The Hussar is the ship that got away. It has long been part of the lore of a South Bronx community that is among the poorest in the nation, promising untold riches for anyone with the imagination and courage to pluck it from the mud and trash of the East River. Its call has enthralled generations of residents and historians, and lured numerous fortune seekers.”
Two other East River maritime catastrophes are remembered today, probably because of the graphic images created at the time.
On October 7, 1833 steamship New England ploughed up the East River, destined for Hartford. Arriving off Essex at 3:00 am, the engine was stopped but both boilers exploded “with a noise like heavy cannon. The shock was dreadful; and the scene which followed … [w]as awful and heart-rending beyond description.”
New England burst its boilers off Essex, October 8, 1833, killing 13 people. Woodcut from Steamboat Disasters and Railroad Accidents in the United States by Warren Lazell, 1846
The ladies’ cabin suffered the worst: “Those who on first alarm, sprang from their berths, were more or less scalded. All who were on deck abaft the boilers, were either killed or wounded….Thirteen people perished, including five crewmen.
And mentioned in an earlier essay, Lexington was a paddlewheel steamboat servicing New York City and Providence. Commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1835, it was considered one of the most luxurious steamers in operation. In 1837, the Lexington switched to the route between New York and Stonington, Connecticut, to connect with the newly built Old Colony railroad to Boston.
Hartford lithographers D. W. Kellogg & Co. published this view of the doomed Lexington sometime after Nathaniel Currier’s print was released. Survivors can be seen clinging to floating debris in the foreground. 2003.263.0
On the night of January 13, 1840, midway through the ship’s voyage through the Sound, a fire ignited bales of cotton that were stored (illegally) on deck. The fire went out of control and the order was given to abandon ship. The ships’ overcrowded lifeboats sank almost immediately, leaving the ship’s passengers and crew to drown in the freezing water. Rough water, poor visibility, the frigid cold and the wind made rescue attempts impossible. Of the 143 people on board the Lexington that night, only 4 survived.
These are the East River maritime disasters we remember. Over the years, there were many more incidents and even sinkings – if not hundreds or thousands. The East River was a turbulent and troubled and extraordinarily busy waterway. And as we see every day, it still is.
Thanks for reading.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
July 20, 2021
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Text by Judith Berdy
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Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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Sources
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tragedy-east-river-general-slocum-disaster-article-1.787322
https://www.nan.usace.army.mil/Portals/37/docs/history/hellgate.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/finding-trash-and-worse-but-so-far-no-ship-with-treasure.html https://connecticuthistory.org/the-steamboat-new-england-the-shock-was-dreadful-today-in-history/FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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