General Slocum
General Slocum
In Brief
An event of 15 June 1904, reported in newspapers around the
world on the following day, gave Joyce an occasion to include
a representative horror of modern life. The General Slocum,
a triple-decked side-wheel paddle steamboat carrying
German-American women, children, and grandparents from lower
Manhattan to a picnic spot on Long Island Sound, caught fire
on the East River and sank off the Bronx shore. More than
1,000 of the approximately 1,400 people on board drowned,
burned to death, died of smoke inhalation, or were crushed by
huge paddle-blades, in a catastrophe made far worse by
carelessness, ineptitude, and corruption. It was the worst New
York disaster before the attacks on the World Trade Center in
2001, and perhaps only the greater death toll on the Titanic
in 1912 has kept it from continuing its hold on cultural
memory.
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In Lotus Eaters Bloom carries around a copy of the Freeman's Journal, which
reported the disaster on the morning of June 16, and in Aeolus
he visits the paper's offices. In Lestrygonians,
before the novel mentions any newspaper accounts, he thinks of
what he has apparently learned from the Freeman: "All
those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and
drowned in New York. Holocaust." Reports of the
disaster surface in Wandering Rocks on newsboards
announcing "a dreadful catastrophe in New York," and in
Eumaeus the "New York disaster" is covered in
the Evening Telegraph.
But the fullest account of the horror comes in Wandering
Rocks when Tom Kernan, pleased with having booked an
order, stops in for a celebratory drink: "I'll just take a
thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir.
Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General
Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand
casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down
women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was
the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous
revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the
firehose all burst."
"Spontaneous combustion" refers to the fact that the fire may
have started in the ship's Lamp Room, where lamp oil, dirty
rags, straw, or trash on the floor could have been ignited by
a match or cigarette. When a teenage boy reported the fire to
the captain, he was told to shut up and mind his own business.
Some minutes later, the captain realized the truth of the
boy's report, but instead of heading to the nearby Manhattan
shore, where there were stores of oil and lumber, he
accelerated toward an island across the river, steering his
vessel into a headwind that fanned the flames.
The "heartrending scenes" crowd upon one another in
imagination. When the fires grew, sections of deck collapsed,
pitching people into the flames below. Desperate passengers
found that all the lifeboats on the ship were wired and
painted down and could not be lowered into the water. Most of
them could not swim, and the women who tried were weighed down
by the heavy wool clothing of the time. Mothers placed life
preservers on their children and threw them into the water,
only to watch them sink like stones. The life preservers,
which had been hanging in place for 13 years, their canvas
covers rotting, were filled with cheap pulverized cork and
seem to have had iron bars stuck in them to bring them up to
regulation weight. The 36 crewmen had never trained in a fire
drill, and when they tried to put out the fires, the hoses
fell apart in their hands. Rather than assist passengers, many
of them sought their own safety—among them the captain, who
jumped onto a tugboat as soon as the boat settled on the river
bottom, leaving his burning passengers behind.
All of the safety equipment on the boat had passed inspection
a few weeks earlier, but clearly nothing was actually
inspected. The Knickerbocker Steamship Company had a long
history of graft and bribery, uncovered by newspaper
investigations after the disaster, and the General Slocum,
which had suffered numerous groundings and collisions in its
13-year life, had sadly decayed from the showpiece it once
was. Two inspectors were indicted but found not guilty. The
Company received only a small fine. Only the captain, William
Van Shaick, went to jail. Tom Kernan comments on the influence
that big money perennially wields in America: "What I can't
understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like
that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know
why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now,
look at that. And America they say is the land of the free.
I thought we were bad here."
The people who had chartered the General Slocum for
a highly festive outing to Locust Grove, Long Island, hailed
from the working- and middle-class neighborhood of Kleindeutchland
[sic] or Little Germany on the lower east side of Manhattan.
The excursion was organized by the pastor of St. Mark's
Evangelical Lutheran Church, George Haas. It was intended to
celebrate the end of the church school year, and to give
church members a respite from crowded, grimy Manhattan. People
showed up for the long-anticipated trip in their best clothes
and passed up the river in high spirits until the fire broke
out.
The Protestant faith of the victims figures in Wandering
Rocks when Father Conmee, reading about the disaster,
thinks complacently that "In America those things were
continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that,
unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition."
"Perfect contrition" is a safety valve that compassionate
Catholic theologians have dreamed up to save the souls of
people who face death without access to the rite of extreme
unction (normally required): lacking the church's intervention
with God, the sinner's sincere repentance may in certain
exceptional cases be enough. But this kindly indulgence can
hardly be expected to apply to believers who lack the true
faith.
