Today’s History Thread remembers one of the strangest disasters in modern history, the saga of the Morro Castle. On September 8th, 1934 this ocean liner caught fire off the shore of New Jersey, killing 137 people and leaving a massive hulk on the coastline as an unlikely tourist attraction. While coverage at the time exposed the ship’s lax safety measures and poor performance of the crew, later researchers suspect that the ship’s fate might have been something more sinister than an accident.

A vessel of the Ward Line, the Morro Castle made regular trips between New York and Havana, offering Depression-era Americans an escape from their dismal lives to the tropical, free-wheeling Caribbean. Advertisements promised gourmet food, a house orchestra and all the expected comforts of a modern ocean liner. However, a recent uprising by disgruntled soldiers (among them future dictator Fulgencio Batista) made Cuba a less-than-ideal vacation destination in September 1934 – which didn’t stop some 400 passengers (both its usual complement of American and Cuban pleasure seekers, and some refugees from the island’s turmoil on the return voyage) from embarking upon its final voyage.

As if sailing into a warzone weren’t enough, the Morro Castle was also connected to criminal activities. Rumors abounded of the ship’s involvement in bootlegging and drug-smuggling, and one crew member testified that he found a large collection of small arms and ammunition in the ship’s “sporting quarters,” presuming they were destined for Cuba’s military to circumvent an official arms embargo. This perhaps wasn’t as implausible as it appeared; the Morro had a $750,000-a-year government contract to deliver mail to Cuba. On the other hand, the Ward Line insisted that any guns onboard were legally owned by passengers, who shipped them on vacation.

Throughout its final voyage in September 1934, the Morro Castle was beset by portents of trouble. The passengers complained of cold food and poor service from the wait staff, while the ship’s engineers struggled with a malfunctioning boiler. But the main stress came between Captain Robert Willmot and his crew members. Willmot, an English-born veteran of 31 years at sea, was normally an easygoing, gregarious skipper; recently, however, he grew convinced that his crew were conspiring against him. He had recently fired his chief radio operator, Stanley Ferson, over insinuations that Ferson had been undermining his authority. He replaced him with the recently hired George White Rogers, a portly radio whiz whose short temper and strange personal habits (such as rubbing himself with ointments that he claimed gave him sexual powers) seriously disturbed his crewmates.

Granted, Willmot’s suspicions weren’t entirely unfounded, even if Ferson appears to have been innocent. Second radio operator George Alagna created a petition protesting the long hours and irregular duties the Captain recently impressed upon his crew, including onerous cleaning duties while the vessel was in port. When Willmot discovered Alagna’s complaint, he accused the radioman of being a “communist” and send a message to his employer demanding he be fired. Soon afterwards, Willmot became ill after eating haddock left over from the passenger dinner, and suspected poisoning; incredibly, his mates thought that the Captain’s paranoia had caught up with him, and neglected to investigate his claims, even throwing the fish overboard without examination.

On the evening of September 7th, the Morro Castle sailed into a nor’easter as it neared the coast of New Jersey. This did nothing to improve the mood onboard the ship; the passengers, increasingly frustrated with the subpar official functions, held impromptu drinking parties throughout the night, annoying the crew with loud and raucous singing. Captain Willmot made a perfunctory appearance at dinner, assuring the passengers that the weather wouldn’t impede their voyage. Witnesses recalled him seeming weak and disoriented, lacking his usual energy, and he excused himself as soon as possible. An hour later, Willmot was found dead in his quarters, slumped over a bathtub with a tray of half-eaten food nearby; First Officer William Warms assumed the helm (over the objections of Chief Engineer Eban Abbott, nominally the next in command), after the medical officer pronounced “acute indigestion” as Willmot’s cause of death.

By 2:50 am on the next day (September 8th) the ship was deep into the storm; neither the weather nor an announcement of Willmot’s death dissuaded passengers from extending their carousing into the wee hours of the morning. At this point, one passenger reported a strong smell of smoke to Steward Daniel Campbell, who traced it to a locker in the writing room. Campbell and another crew member opened the locker, and “tongues of blue flame” shot out, immediately engulfing the room. Campbell and his colleague went to grab hoses and turn on the ship’s water hydrants, ignoring a nearby fire extinguisher that might have stopped the fire in its early stages; by the time they returned, the blaze was out of control. Nor were the ship’s metal fire doors working, as their automatic trip wires had been disconnected for repairs.

Acting Captain Warms did nothing to help the crisis. He initially dismissed the fire as a minor nuisance, spending 15 crucial minutes allowing his crew to fight the fire (bizarrely assuming that the clouds of black smoke meant the fire was being extinguished) before issuing a general alarm. Wireless operator George White Rogers sent several messages to the Coast Guard indicating trouble, but Warms refused to authorize an SOS until the fire was already out of control. Rogers managed to get off a single SOS before the ship completely lost power. Seeing the distant shore through the darkness, Warms made an effort to beach the ship, but the fire spread to the engine room, preventing it from gaining steam. This maneuver did, however, expose the ship’s port side to the raging wind, which gusted through the portholes and fanned the flames into an inferno, roasting many trapped below decks.

All sense of order was lost as passengers panicked in the darkness, swarming on deck to escape the smoke and flames. Things were scarcely better topside; while smoke engulfed the air, construction glue used in a recent renovation of the deck became super-heated, literally gluing many hapless passengers to the ship. The crew had also neglected to conduct any lifeboat drills during their time at sea; many passengers hadn’t even realized that their rooms contained life jackets. Under such circumstances, there was no hope of an orderly evacuation.

Error compounded error. Crew members proved unable to launch many of the lifeboats, with the launching mechanisms having been painted over at Captain Willmot’s orders and thus unable to use. Others simply caught fire or became tangled in the davits. Without help from the crew, and with lifeboats unavailable, many of the passengers simply jumped into the water, many drowning or being sucked into the ship’s still-churning propellers. Even those passengers lucky to obtain life jackets hadn’t been instructed how to use them; when they leapt into the water the jackets jolted upwards upon impact, often breaking their wearer’s necks.

Due to the belated SOS and the poor weather, the Coast Guard was slow in responding, despite repeated radio reports of a “burning ship” off the coast. Some lucky passengers and crew managed to make their way ashore. Several Coast Guard cutters arrived, rescuing victims from the water and attempting to tow the still-smoking vessel. However, the overheated towline became entangled in the USS Tampa‘s propellers, setting the Morro Castle adrift. After being batted around by hurricane-forced winds, the hapless hulk crashed ashore at Asbury Park, still on fire despite the weather. There, it became a spectacle to thousands of New Jerseyites alerted to the disaster by breathless media coverage. Overall, 137 passengers and crew perished in the conflagration; their bodies washed ashore for weeks afterwards.

Several investigations exposed the safety hazards onboard the Morro Castle, defective fire safety equipment and the poor performance of the ship’s crew. Acting Captain Warms refused to accept responsibility for his mishandling of the disaster, unconvincingly denying that he’d been in charge after Willmot’s death (conveniently forgetting how he usurped power over the Chief Engineer). The Ward Line tried to pass blame for the disaster onto the disgruntled George Alagna, but Alagna’s shipmates testified on his behalf (Alagna was, however, blackballed for the rest of his career). Instead, the bridge officers were stripped of their sailing licenses and indicted for negligence; however, they were all acquitted and returned to careers at sea.

Meanwhile the FBI, learning of Captain Willmot’s troubles with his crew and the rumors of gun-smuggling, sniffed a communist conspiracy. J. Edgar Hoover characteristically tried to link the conflagration to Cuban rebels, a lead which went nowhere, while also repeating the Captain’s smear of Alagna as a Bolshevik. President Franklin Roosevelt, a former Undersecretary of the Navy, also took an active interest in the disaster; he was infuriated by the crew’s response and pressed Congress for stricter rules on shipboard safety.

Hoover’s G-Men did, however, uncover the sordid past of George White Rogers, the wireless operator who became a hero for his conduct in the wireless room and later helping passengers to escape the burning ship. Rogers, it turned out, had a history of mental illness, petty crime (from theft to assault) and most damning of all, an obsession with explosives. He’d allegedly poisoned his estranged wife’s dog, and been present during a mysterious fire on a Navy base during his military service. Rogers was also one of the last men to see Captain Willmot alive; he’d been caught by a fellow crew member bringing bottles of acid on board a few hours earlier. Other investigators, however, slighted suspicions of Rogers in favor of a likely chemical fire, caused by poor electrical wiring and unsafe, flammable paints added during recent renovations. At the very least, the latter clearly contributed to the spread and deadliness of the fire.

The lurid press coverage, and presidential pressure, led to significant reforms in ship fire safety methods. The incident, and the emerging accusations of gun-running and cost-cutting, caused the Ward Line to fall into a financial tailspin from which it never recovered, despite rebranding as the Cuba Mail Line (it went out of business in 1954). Rogers, apparently unscathed by the FBI’s suspicions, briefly became a celebrity: he even performed a vaudeville show recounting his acts of heroism, such as rescuing an old lady and her canary, cage and all. Yet police investigators, journalists and others grew unnerved about contradictions in his accounts, and his anxious evasion of difficult questions. Regardless, the limelight soon wandered elsewhere; Rogers, unable to find another shipboard job, opened an electronics store, which went bankrupt and then mysteriously went up in flames.

A friend arranged for Rogers to be hired as a police officer at the nearby town of Bayonne, New Jersey, despite his lack of law enforcement experience. His partner, Lieutenant Vincent Doyle, initially befriended Rogers, bonding over their shared interest in radios and fishing. But Doyle quickly suspected that Rogers knew more than he was telling investigators – especially when he presented a “theory” that the fire had been caused by a small explosive device. Since Rogers would not stop talking about the incident, Doyle began compiling a dossier of incriminating statements by his partner. Before Doyle could report his suspicions, he received a package which Rogers claimed contained a filter for a heated fish tank. Upon plugging it in, the device (rigged with a crude bomb, suspiciously like the device Rogers “speculated” had destroyed the Morro) exploded, badly maiming the policeman.

Thanks to Doyle’s testimony, Rogers was quickly linked to the bombing, and convicted of attempted murder. Though paroled during World War II for military service, he struggled to find steady work after his discharge and lived out of his van. He lost a factory job after a coworker accused him of poisoning the office water cooler, and after he harassed and stalked a female coworker. He unwisely kept reminding people of the Morro Castle, which in turn reminded them of his criminal conviction. Finally in 1954, Rogers murdered a man and his wife who had loaned him money for another failed business venture. He died in prison in 1958, his “heroism” overshadowed by his misdeeds – and suspicions that, in torching the Morro Castle, he might have committed an even more unspeakable crime.

As for the Morro Castle, its hulk remained beached on the beach outside the Asbury Park pier, becoming a tourist attraction for several months, with many local entrepreneurs charging visitors for access to the ship. Eventually, the vessel was finally towed by the Coast Guard to Baltimore, where it was scrapped. Historians still debate whether the ship was lost to a tragic accident, an individual act of arson by Rogers, an insurance scam gone wrong or sabotage by Cuban communists. Whatever conclusions one draws, there’s plenty of blame to go around; certainly, the Morro Castle‘s sorry fate is one of the ugliest, strangest disasters in modern maritime history.

Note: this article draws heavily from Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle (1972) which lays the blame squarely on Rogers. For a more recent and balanced perspective, see Brian Hicks, When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle and Its Deadly Wake (2006). Most of the above images come from the blog Hushed Up History, which also draws upon the Thomas and Witts book.