SS Morro Castle

1934

Asbury Park, the captain already dead Location: off Asbury Park, New Jersey, USA · Coordinates: 40.25°N 74.00°W · Casualties: 137 · Survivors: ~412 · Depth: grounded · scrapped · Cause: fire — Fire broke out in a storage locker off the Jersey coast at 02:50 on 8 September 1934. Captain Robert Willmott had died of a sudden heart attack eight hours earlier, leaving the chief officer in command. Crew response and firefighting were chaotic; the fire spread through the vessel in thirty minutes. · Fate: ran aground at Asbury Park · scrapped · Type: cruise liner · Ward Line · Tonnage: 11,520 tons · Crew: 240 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1930 American Ward Line cruise ship, Havana to New York with Labor Day holiday passengers. Captain Robert Willmott died of a sudden heart attack on the evening of 7 September 1934; hours later a fire broke out in a storage locker off the Jersey coast. 137 dead of 549 aboard. The burning hulk drifted onto the beach directly in front of the Asbury Park Convention Hall, where it drew crowds for months and drove the first meaningful American shipboard fire regulations. The Vessel The SS Morro Castle was an American-flag cruise liner of the Ward Line, formally the New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Company. She was built at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in 1930 and entered service on the New York-Havana cruise route on 23 August 1930 as the principal vessel of the Ward Line's rapidly-expanding Cuban leisure trade. She was 155 metres long, 11,520 gross tons, certified for 489 cabin passengers and 240 crew, with a designed service speed of 20 knots on twin turbo-electric screws. Her commercial premise was the Prohibition-era American demand for legal alcohol: Cuba, a Ward Line's primary Caribbean destination, was a short overnight cruise from New York and operated under laws that permitted the full consumption and sale of alcohol. The Ward Line's 1930 advertising campaign positioned the Morro Castle as the sophisticated American's way around the Volstead Act, and her 72-hour round-trip cruises (two nights in Havana, followed by a return to New York) became an established leisure pattern of the early 1930s. Her master at the date of her final voyage was Captain Robert R. Willmott, 63, a career Ward Line officer who had commanded the Morro Castle since 1931. Her chief officer was William Warms, 46, also a career Ward Line officer. Her radio officer was George Rogers, 33, a recent Ward Line hire with a service record that the subsequent investigation would find suspicious in multiple respects. The Disaster The lifeboat launches were conducted under conditions of severe disorder. Of her sixteen lifeboats, only six were successfully launched; several swung on davits that had been painted shut, and three of the six that launched were boarded mostly by crew rather than by passengers. The radio officer George Rogers delayed the SOS transmission for approximately forty minutes after the fire was first reported, an act that the subsequent investigation treated with significant suspicion. 137 of 558 aboard died. 421 survived. The dead were overwhelmingly passengers, many of them women and children who had been unable to find an operational lifeboat or who had been overcome by smoke in the cabin corridors. The ship burned through the night and the following morning. She grounded, blazing, on the beach at Asbury Park, New Jersey, shortly before 06:00 on 9 September 1934, where she became, by late morning, the largest tourist attraction on the United States Atlantic coast. An estimated 250,000 people visited the burning wreck at Asbury Park over the following week. Postcards of the smoking hull were sold in Asbury Park's boardwalk shops for a decade. The investigation that followed had two tracks. The formal United States Department of Commerce marine board inquiry identified the fire's proximate cause as a lit cigarette in a stack of cleaning rags in the first-class writing room, and the distal causes as crew undertraining, insufficient fire-drill practice, and Warms's decision to mainta