Remembering the "S.S. Morro Castle"
Mysterious Maritime Disaster Occurred Ninety Years Ago Today
Ninety years ago today, an historic, mysterious catastrophe occurred along the New Jersey shoreline, culminating at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall.
By Saturday, September 8, 1934, the long decline of once-popular Asbury Park had just about begun. And its summer tourist season had ended after Labor Day (the previous Monday). Fifty years earlier, as the fortunes of the town (then a Borough, later a City) were rising, a local booster wrote that all the town needed to augment its summer season was a shipwreck to attract tourists year-round: “We want a first-class shipwreck. Why? To make Asbury Park a famous winter resort … She should strike head-on, so that her nose would ram the Baby Parade grandstand, and her tail might hop around even with the end of the pier…. We need a spectacular ship.”
Unfortunately, the spectacular ship, and its spectacular wreck, arrived on September 8, 1934. A horrifying conflagration which had been sailing up the New Jersey coastline since the early morning hours beached a few yards from Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. One hundred thirty-four people died; four hundred fifteen survived. All of a sudden, Asbury Park had a second 1934 tourist season. The catastrophe lured tourists from near and far back to the little resort city during the season locals now call “local summer” (and beyond).
The charred hull of the S.S. Morro Castle would attract hundreds of thousands of gawkers and observers until the federal government towed it away two months later.
What was the S.S. Morro Castle, and why did it burn before running aground next to an iconic building which would become an historic concert venue (that still stands today)?
The S.S. Morro Castle was a cruise ship that frequently sailed from New York to Havana. Launching her maiden voyage in August 1930 while Prohibition still blighted American culture, the ship was an opportunity for wealthier (and not-so-wealthier) passengers to legally drink in international waters and sail to lovely Cuba before Communists turned it into the hell on Earth the Morro Castle became. The Ward Line constructed the five-hundred-twenty-eight-feet long ship in Newport News, Virginia, according to the latest ocean safety guidelines, with sufficient lifeboats, luxurious features, a gymnasium, a writing room (imagine a cruise ship today offering that as an attraction), a tea room, a ballroom, and a library (cf. the writing room). The capacity was approximately five hundred passengers and two hundred fifty crew members.
By 1934, the Morro Castle’s allure had largely faded, sort of a twentieth-century maritime version of Asbury Park in fast motion. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 reduced her appeal to revelers, and the ongoing economic trials and tribulations of the Great Depression reduced the number of customers who could afford the voyage. Cabins were frequently vacant. There were only three hundred eighteen passengers on the final voyage. By then, the ship relied on a contract with the federal government to carry mail between Cuba and New York as well as on income generated from cargo. Some of the cargo was rumored to be guns and ammunition sent to the Cuban government from New York to fight against Communists and other rebels, which were purportedly replaced by cheap liquor for the return voyage. Illegal immigrants were also rumored to be among the passengers. Due to the Depression, many young men needed jobs, and some crew members were hired with no maritime experience and poor training. Underpaid and overworked, some reportedly smuggled drugs via the ship to supplement their income. Captain Robert Wilmott had difficulty managing his crew, which comes across as at least as motley as Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
The ship left Havana for the final time on Wednesday, September 5, 1934. A few hours later, Captain Wilmott retired to his cabin, ill from stomach pains. On Friday evening, the captain was found dead. The ship’s doctor determined his cause of death to be “acute indigestion”; the captain was fifty-six. Many believe Captain Wilmott was poisoned. As a storm outside raged, the inexperienced, unprepared, and probably overwhelmed Williams Warms assumed command of the ship as New Jersey loomed.
At 2:45 AM Saturday morning, a fire was discovered in, of all places, the writing room. Most subsequent investigators thought it was arson. After attempts to contain the fire before sounding alarm failed, it rapidly spread. The ship lost power. Warms steered the ship toward shore and a tempestuous wind which exacerbated the fire. The passengers had gone through no emergency drills; most of the two hundred thirty-one crew members hadn’t, either. Six lifeboats were launched, but they were mostly filled with crew (the first had one passenger and thirty crew members).
The fire was spotted from the Shark River Coast Guard Station in Neptune and other ships at 4:15 AM, but small ships could not reach the Morro Castle in the stormy high seas. A cutter from the U.S. Coast Guard approached around 8 AM near Sea Girt, attaching a line to tow the ship. Many passengers jumped into the dangerous waters. Some were rescued by other ships. The towline was secured to the burning boat by 11, but the small cutter couldn’t successfully tow the large ship. At 6 PM, the line snapped, and the Morro Castle drifted to Asbury Park Convention Hall.
Thomas Burley, broadcasting from inside the Convention Hall building live on radio station WCAP, looked outside and shouted, “She’s here!” He watched the ship, decks ablaze, come to rest around one hundred yards away. Six charred cadavers were found on the ship. Many who drowned floated to shore over the next several days.
And hundreds of thousands of tourists returned to Asbury Park to see the ruined ship over the next few months, starting the very next day. Local residents immediately put up signs alerting motorists to their proximity to the wreck. Restaurants attracted customers by advertising the view from their establishments. Not helping its reputation for shameless cashing in, The City charged twenty-five cents to view the remains from Convention Hall. City officials thought they had the year-round attraction they had wanted. It was only dudgeon from the national press and local citizens that shamed the city council to proclaim the idea was “a base, vicious and mercenary desire to exploit.” The city manager assured all proceeds would be donated to grieving families, and the federal government took the hull away in November.
The S.S. Morro Castle disaster changed maritime history. Fire prevention was incorporated into future ship design and construction, and mandatory drills for cast and crew intensified.
Was Captain Wilmott poisoned? Was the writing room fire an accident? Was it arson? People still debate these questions.
What possible motive could someone have for poisoning the captain and/or setting the ship ablaze?
I don’t know how or why this tragedy occurred (if there is a “why” and it wasn’t just a series of unfortunate, freak natural occurrences). I can only speculate what possible motives there were to murder the captain and commit arson, if one or both of those events transpired.
Perhaps Wilmott died of natural causes and the fire was an accident. It is also possible Wilmott died of natural causes and the fire was arson. If that was the case and the two events were unrelated, the fire was probably a misanthropic act by a simple monster wanting nothing more than to kill scores of people. Perhaps it was the act of a more sophisticated nihilist, a Leopold or Loeb wishing to commit the “perfect crime” at sea.
If there was a connection between the captain’s death and the fire, however, it suggests more of a calculated plot—someone with a “nobler” motive, someone with a message (and, if two or more people were involved, this would now be a “conspiracy theory”).
Misguided people tend to rationalize mass death because they think it will save more lives in the long run. The better of them probably consider their victims something akin to casualties of war. Perhaps someone saw the inexperienced crew and lax safety standards of these and similar ships and saw an opportunity to draw attention to a problem. Maybe this individual or individuals thought that a disaster would inspire, whether through voluntary action or government coercion, better and safer ships and seafaring practices. That did, in fact, come to pass. No one deserved to lose a life for that, and there were and are better ways to effect those kinds of changes, but not everyone understands that or has the necessary patience for change. Many believe that some (by no means all) of today’s mass shooters are motivated by a misguided desire for yet more government “gun control” and think that government action will save more lives in the long run despite a lack of evidence that it will. (Consistent collectivists do not even recognize individuals as fully real, autonomous beings and certainly don’t recognize that they have rights. To such people, any number of individuals can die for the “right” cause.) Maybe a deranged, invidious, “temperance” minded arsonist wanted to punish sinning drinkers in the months after the repeal of Prohibition.
Maybe it was all an unfortunate accident.
The S.S. Morro Castle disaster was an odd footnote to maritime history, Asbury Park history, and New Jersey history. The best way to honor those who died in such excruciating, terrifying, harrowing agony ninety years ago today (and, in the case of Captain Wilmott, this week) is to be aware of the potential for such disasters, whether the source is nature or humans.
Sources:
Asbury Park Historical Society
Mazzagetti, Dominick. The Jersey Shore: The Past, Present, and Future of a National Treasure. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Wolff, Daniel. 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.