SS Morro Castle was an American ocean liner that caught fire and ran aground on the morning of September 8, 1934, en route from Havana, Cuba, to New York City, United States, with the loss of 137 passengers and crew.
On the previous evening, Morro Castles captain, Robert Willmott, had died suddenly, and his place was taken by Chief Officer William Warms as a strong northeast wind was developing under heavy cloud. At 2:50am, a fire was detected in a storage locker, which burned through electrical cables, engulfed the ship in flames and plunged it into darkness. Responses by the crew, the United States Coast Guard and rescue vessels were notably slow and inefficient, with lifeboats not loaded to their capacity. The decks were too hot to stand on, smoke made breathing difficult and passengers were forced to leap into ocean swells where swimming was impossible. By mid-afternoon Morro Castle was abandoned and the survivors were landed on the shores of New Jersey by an assortment of craft.
The cause of the fire was never established, though an overheated funnel and certain points of cabin design and electrical circuitry were noted. A theory of arson by a crew member has attracted support over the years, albeit without any concrete evidence. The high casualties are chiefly blamed on the crew's incompetent handling of the emergency.
Building On May 22, 1928, the United States Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1928, creating a $250 million construction fund to be lent to American shipping companies to replace old and outdated ships with new ones. Each of these loans, which could subsidize as much as seventy-five percent of the cost of the ship, was to be paid back over twenty years at low interest rates.
One company that availed itself of this opportunity was the New York and Cuba Mail Steam Ship Company, better known as the Ward Line, which had been carrying passengers, cargo and mail to and from Cuba since the mid-19th century. Naval architects were hired by the Ward Line to design a pair of passenger liners to be named Morro Castle, after the stone fortress and lighthouse in Havana, and Oriente, after Cuba's Oriente Province.
At the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, work was begun on Morro Castle in January 1929. In March 1930 the ship was christened, followed in May by her sister ship Oriente. Each ship was long, measured and had turbo-electric transmission, with General Electric twin turbo generators supplying current to propulsion motors on twin propeller shafts. Each ship was luxuriously finished to accommodate 489 passengers in first and tourist class and 240 officers and crew. In a growing age of passenger ships having cruiser sterns, Morro Castle and Oriente were built with classic counter sterns.
As built, Morro Castle was equipped with direction finding and submarine signalling equipment. Submarine signalling was becoming obsolete as a form of communication, so by 1934 it had been removed. That same year, echo sounding equipment and a gyrocompass had been installed on the ship.
Career
Morro Castle began her maiden voyage on August 23, 1930. She lived up to expectations by completing the 1,100+ mile southbound trip in just under fifty-nine hours, and the return trip took only fifty-eight hours. Over the next four years, Morro Castle and Oriente performed as workhorses, rarely out of service and, despite the worsening of the Great Depression, able to maintain a steady clientele. Their success was in part due to Prohibition, as such trips provided a relatively affordable and (more importantly) legal means for customers to drink alcoholic beverages. The Ward Line's reasonable rates attracted Cuban and American businessmen and older couples, making the ships a microcosm of America during the period.
Final voyage Impending nor'easter The final voyage of Morro Castle began in Havana on September 5, 1934. On the afternoon of September 6, as the ship paralleled the southeastern coast of the U.S., it began to encounter increasing clouds and wind. By the morning of September 7, the clouds had thickened and the winds had shifted to easterly, the first indication of a developing nor'easter. Throughout that day the winds increased and intermittent rains began, causing many to retire early to their berths.
Captain's death Early that evening, Captain Robert Rennison Willmott had his dinner delivered to his quarters. Shortly thereafter, Willmott complained of stomach trouble and retired to his quarters for the evening. Sometime after this, it was discovered that the Captain had died. Command of the ship passed to the First Officer, William Warms, who was eating dinner with his fiancée Mary Cudworth at the time. The Captain's body was wrapped and taken to the cold storage, to preserve him until they reached their destination. During the overnight hours, the winds increased to over thirty miles per hour as Morro Castle plodded its way up the East Coast.
Fire
At around 2:50 a.m. on September 8, while Morro Castle was sailing around eight nautical miles off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, a fire was detected in a storage locker within the First Class Writing Room on B Deck. Within the next thirty minutes, the ship became engulfed in flames. As the fire grew in intensity, Acting Captain Warms attempted to beach the ship, but the growing need to launch lifeboats and abandon ship forced him to give up his plan.
Within twenty minutes of the fire's discovery (at about 3:10) the fire had burned through Morro Castles main electrical cables, plunging the ship into darkness. As all power was lost, the radio stopped working, so only a single SOS signal was sent. At about the same time, the wheelhouse lost its ability to steer the ship, as the hydraulic lines were severed by the fire as well.
Cut off by the fire amidships, passengers tended to move toward the stern. Most crew members, on the other hand, moved to the forecastle. In many places, the deck boards were hot to the touch and breathing was difficult in the thick smoke. As conditions grew steadily worse, the decision became either "jump or burn" for many passengers. However, jumping into the water was problematic, as high winds churned up great waves that made swimming extremely difficult. Passengers and crew exhibited the full range of reactions to the disaster at hand. Some crew members were incredibly brave as they tried to fight the fire. Others tossed deck chairs and life rings overboard to provide persons in the water with makeshift flotation devices.
Only six of the ship's twelve lifeboats were launched: boats 1, 3, 5, 9, and 11 on the starboard side, and boat 10 on the port side. Although the combined capacity of these boats was 408, they carried only 85 people, most of whom were crew members. Many passengers died for lack of knowledge of how to use the life preservers. As they hit the water, life preservers knocked many persons unconscious, leading to subsequent death by drowning, or broke victims' necks from the impact, killing them instantly.
Rescue efforts at sea
First responders were slow to react. The first rescue ship to arrive on the scene was Andrea F. Luckenbach. Two other ships—Monarch of Bermuda and City of Savannah—were slow in taking action after receiving the SOS signal but eventually did arrive on the scene. The fourth ship to participate in the rescue operations was , which launched a motorboat that made a cursory circuit around Morro Castle and, upon seeing nobody in the water along her route, retrieved her motorboat and left the scene.
The United States Coast Guard vessels and positioned themselves too far away to see the victims in the water and rendered little assistance. The Coast Guard's aerial station at Cape May, New Jersey, failed to send their float planes until local radio stations started reporting that dead bodies were washing ashore on New Jersey beaches, from Point Pleasant Beach to Spring Lake.
In time, additional small boats arrived on the scene. Large ocean swells presented a major problem, making it very difficult to see people in the water. A plane piloted by Harry Moore, governor of New Jersey and commander of the New Jersey Air National Guard, helped boats to find survivors and bodies by dipping its wings and dropping markers.
Recovery efforts on shore As telephone communication and radio stations spread news of the disaster along the New Jersey coast, local citizens assembled on the coastline to assist the injured, retrieve the dead and try to unite families that had been scattered among different rescue boats that landed on the beaches. By mid-morning, Morro Castle was totally abandoned and its burning hull drifted ashore, coming to a stop late that afternoon in shallow water off Asbury Park, at almost the exact spot where the New Era had wrecked in 1854. Fires continued to smoulder on board for the next two days and, in the end, 135 passengers and crew (out of a total of 549) were lost.
Morro Castle was declared a total loss, and its charred hulk was finally towed away from the Asbury Park shoreline on March 14, 1935. According to one account, it later started settling by the stern and sank while being towed and had to be refloated. (Other accounts have it that the ship was towed without any issues). Regardless, it was towed to Gravesend Bay and then to Baltimore on March 29, 1935, where it was scrapped.
In the intervening months, because of its proximity to the Asbury Park Boardwalk and the adjacent Asbury Park Convention Hall pier, from which it was possible to wade out and touch the wreck with one's hands, the wreck was treated as a destination for sightseeing trips, complete with stamped penny souvenirs and postcards for sale. Originally published in The New Yorker, November 17, 1934.
Factors contributing to the fire The design of Morro Castle, the materials used in her construction and questionable crew practices escalated the on-board fire to a roaring inferno that would eventually destroy the ship.
Construction materials As far as the materials used in her construction were concerned, the elegant but highly flammable decor of Morro Castle—veneered wooden surfaces and glued ply paneling—helped the fire to spread quickly.
Ship's structure and lack of safety features The structure of Morro Castle also created a number of problems. Although the ship had fire doors, there existed a wood-lined, six-inch opening between the wooden ceilings and the steel bulkheads which provided the fire with a flammable pathway that bypassed the fire doors, enabling it to spread.
Whereas the ship had electric sensors that could detect fires in any of the ship's staterooms, crew quarters, offices, cargo holds and engine room, there were no such detectors in the ship's lounges, dance hall, writing room, library, tea room or dining room. Although there were forty-two water hydrants on board, the system was designed with the assumption that no more than six would ever have to be used at any one time.
When the emergency aboard Morro Castle occurred, the crew opened virtually all working hydrants, dropping the water pressure to unusable levels everywhere. The ship's Lyle gun, which is designed to fire a line to another ship to facilitate passenger evacuation in an emergency, was stored over Morro Castle's writing room, which is where the fire originated. The Lyle gun exploded just before 3 a.m., further spreading the fire and breaking windows, thereby allowing the near gale force winds to enter the ship and fan the flames. Finally, fire alarms on the ship produced a "muffled, scarcely audible ring", according to passengers.
Crew practices and deficiencies