by Glenn Stout
There was no rush. The Slocum leisurely moved up the East River, slowly gaining speed. The water was like glass, and those aboard the vessel could barely tell the ship was moving, yet at full steam she elegantly and sleekly ripped through the water at sixteen knots. On one of the decks a German band played familiar songs—American tunes, like "Swanee River," as well as "On the Beautiful Rhine" and other German songs, giving the journey the feel of something like a moving carnival. It was a perfect day—everyone kept saying so.
But just after 10:00 A.M., as the boat steamed up the East River toward Long Island Sound, a young boy exploring the lower deck at amidships, just in front of the pilothouse, sniffed the air. Woodsmoke. Living in the tenements, where even the smallest fire could spread rapidly and endanger dozens, if not hundreds of residents, even young children were attuned to the fear of fire. The boy sensed that there was something not right with the smell of woodsmoke below decks. Glancing around he noticed a small puff of smoke rising slowly up a narrow stairway.
Turning on his heels, the boy found a deckhand, told the young man that he smelled smoke, and led the crewman back to the top of the stairs. The sailor then followed his nose down the stairs to the doorway to a storage room. At the bottom of the steps, barely visible, he saw a few faint wisps of white smoke escaping from beneath the door, then rising up the stairs and rapidly dissipating.
Inside a small fire was smoldering. The floor was littered with straw and excelsior that had been used as packing material, and sometime earlier that morning, somehow, an ember had fallen to the floor, likely from a discarded match used to light a lamp or from the ash of a cigarette or cigar. There it had smoldered and perhaps even briefly turned to flame, but behind the closed door and virtually starved of oxygen, the fire barely stayed lit. Had the door remained closed for the rest of the day, it may well have gone out on its own.
But the deckhand, poorly trained and inexperienced, made a terrible mistake. Instead of calling one of his superiors for assistance and then preparing to fight the fire, he impulsively opened the door.
After a moment of hesitation, as if taking in a big breath, the fire inhaled the precious oxygen the open door now provided and roared to life. The flames licked upward and the excelsior burst into flame, nearly filling the room and sending a blast of heat toward the doorway. The crewman suddenly realized his mistake and panicked yet again. Instead of slamming the door shut and retreating, calling an alarm, he left the door open and tried to smother the flames with the only item within reach—a bag of charcoal. He threw the heavy bag on the source of the fire, which momentarily squashed flames, leaving only smoke. The deckhand raced away to get help, but instead of closing the door, he left it wide open.
With each step he took, oxygen and flame combined to kill. The fires roared back to life, and within minutes the flames raced out the open door and up the stairs. The blaze began to spread quickly as the wooden vessel, covered by layer upon layer of highly flammable paint, proved to be near-perfect fuel.
By the time the deckhand and other crew members made their way to the lower deck, the fire was serious, but not out of control. Yet they did not panic, not yet. The boat was equipped with standpipes and water hoses, and if the crew could get water to the fire quickly, there was still time to quench the flames.
As quickly as possible the crew pulled the hoses from the reels on which they hung and twisted the valves to open the flow of water. The water came, but instead of flowing through the hoses to the nozzle, as soon as the hoses became pressurized, they split, and instead of a stream of water being directed at the fire, the water simply spilled harmlessly—and ineffectively—over the deck.
Although the General Slocum had been launched in 1891, the canvas hoses had never been tested or even adequately inspected since. Fourteen years of exposure to the elements left them brittle and rotten.
The crewmen quickly processed the meaning of that failure and quickly abandoned their duties, racing toward the upper decks where more than thirteen hundred passengers were still oblivious to the danger spreading below.
Anna Weber and her party were chatting happily, unaware of the growing alarm down below, when all of a sudden a large puff of smoke belched out of a stairwell. Everyone stopped talking for a moment, and then someone quipped, "Don't mind that, it's just the chowder cooking." Anna let loose a nervous laugh, but within seconds flame followed smoke, and then the passengers heard the crew racing through the ship, yelling "fire" and spreading panic as fast as the flames.
In a heartbeat everyone on deck leaped into action. Anna, like nearly every other mother aboard the vessel, began screaming and calling for her children. Anna's husband raced into the crowd to find them and disappeared almost instantly.
It was a perilous situation, but not yet a very deadly one, for dozens of piers lined the river's edge. The captain of the Slocum, Edward Van Schaik, was now aware that his boat was on fire. All he needed to do was throttle back on the engines and pull alongside the nearest pier, an act that would have taken only a minute or two and would have given most of his passengers a chance to disembark.
But like the crewman who had first discovered the blaze, Van Schaik also made a fateful error. Looking down to either side from his vantage point in the pilothouse, although he saw smoke, he thought the fire was smaller and somewhat more contained than it was. He misjudged the seriousness of the situation, and, instead of fearing for the safety of his passengers, his first concern was that if he pulled up to a dock the fire might spread from his vessel, cause the pier to catch on fire, and then, perhaps, cause a larger fire onshore. Van Schaik decided instead to keep steaming upriver at full speed. He knew the East River well and planned to run the ship aground on North Brother Island, a twenty-acre islet in the entrance to Long Island Sound.
Although North Brother Island was less than five minutes away, to those on board the vessel each subsequent second was an eternity. No one knew Van Schaik's plans—all they knew was that flames and smoke were rapidly approaching. Anna Weber heard a man calling to "get the life preservers," and like dozens of other passengers, Anna climbed atop chairs and tables to reach the deck ceiling where the preservers were stored overhead. Some were wired fast, and others crumbled to the touch, but some passengers managed to pull some loose then strap them on each other and their children.
In a sense, Anna was lucky. She was unable to find a preserver. Those who did leaped overboard, where they bobbed to the surface for a moment, thinking they were safe, but then, after only a few seconds, most began to sink. Like the fire hoses, the life preservers on board the Slocum also dated from 1891. Their canvas covers had rotted, and the cork used to provide flotation had degraded into dust, losing all buoyancy. Instead of saving lives, as the cork dust became waterlogged the life preservers became dead weight. One might as well have strapped on a concrete block.
Some passengers and crew members then turned their attention to the vessel's lifeboats, which, like the preservers, were plentiful, more than enough to save everyone. But they too were useless. At some time in the past they had been wired fast where they hung and were now impossible to lower into the water.
By now portions of the middle deck were ablaze, and flames ran horizontally across the ceiling. Anna Weber felt the heat on her face and her hair caught fire. Each breath was like the blast from a furnace, and every surface she touched with her hands blistered her flesh. The crowd surged and carried Anna, still screaming for her children and husband, toward the side of the boat.
As the fire grew it created a terrible dilemma for some. Mothers had to choose between the prospect of burning to death with their children or jumping overboard with them into the waters of the East River. For most, the fear of fire proved more powerful than the fear of drowning. As the boat steamed toward North Brother Island, hundreds of passengers, one after the other, from all sides and all decks, leaped or were pushed into the water.
Most didn't have a chance. Only a handful of the passengers knew how
to swim. It seems unbelievable today, but one hundred or so years ago the ability to swim was almost entirely unknown, a skill practiced by only a few men and virtually no women, for in the Victorian era swimming, for a woman, was considered immoral. Learning to swim was taboo.
By the time the boat lurched to a halt in the shallows of North Brother Island, hundreds had jumped overboard and already drowned, while hundreds more had burned to death as the decks began collapsing on one another. Yet hundreds more still remained aboard the vessel, and now the bow of the boat was buried in the sandy bottom only twenty feet offshore in seven feet of water, while the stern lay only fifty feet from shore in thirty feet of water. For those still huddling along the railing, safety was only a few strong swim strokes away.
For most, however, making it to land was as daunting and as likely as making it across the English Channel. Even those few who could swim were burdened by layer upon layer of heavy woolen clothing that acted like a straitjacket.
Still, they tried, mothers and sons and daughters alike. Human beings poured from the vessel, leaping and diving and even being thrown, and for a few moments the water around the boat was alive with people. Anna Weber, like most of the women, could not swim but neither could she convince herself to jump. She somehow found a rope dangling over the side and lowered herself into the water, but since she could not swim, even as the boat kept burning and she felt the flames begin to scorch her hair again, she held fast. She watched as everyone struggled to stay afloat, children grabbing onto their mothers in terror, but with each passing second one head after another slipped beneath the surface. The few who could swim and somehow managed to stay afloat despite their heavy garments had to fight off the desperate grips of those who did not.
Anna was one of the few lucky ones. A man who could swim—she never learned who—grabbed her and convinced her to let go of the rope and somehow pulled her to shore. But hundreds drowned within only a few yards of the beach, some in water so shallow that had they only thought to stand, they would have survived. Yet these nonswimmers were in such fear of the water that as soon as they hit the surface they immediately panicked, breathed in water, and drowned.
Soon screams of panic turned first to soft moans and then to silence, replaced by the crackling roar of the huge vessel fully engulfed in flame. In only fifteen minutes the Slocum burned to the waterline and then bobbed on the surface, steam and smoke rising in the air.
The scene on the beach at North Brother Island was horrific. Each wave delivered more and more bodies to the beach, while hundreds of bodies bobbed face down in the water. Most survivors did not scream or wail or cry, not yet, but stood or sat on the beach in stunned silence, in shock. Anna found her husband on the beach, alive, but nearly naked, his clothes burned off. But their two children were gone, as was her sister, brother, sister-in-law, and, save for the youngest, an infant who miraculously survived, her children as well.
With the carcass of the boat sitting so close to shore, it did not seem possible that so many had died. Captain Van Schaik, who managed to make his way to shore after running the boat aground, was incredulous at the carnage. "I do not understand," he said a short time later, "how so many were lost." While approximately 300 passengers survived, a total of 1, 021 victims were eventually recovered from both the boat itself, trapped under collapsing decks, and from the waters of the East River. Many of the drowned were found still clutching one another.
The disaster was the biggest single loss of life in the history of New York City at the time and remained so until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the vast majority of those who died were residents of Kleindeutschland, all New York mourned. The newspaper descriptions of the panic on board the vessel and the photographs of the bodies of so many women and children laid out on the gravel beach at North Brother Island were almost unbearable.
Women, in particular, were affected, for in the body of each mother and each son or daughter they saw themselves and saw just how random and pointless and unnecessary each death had been. While the government quickly reacted to the tragedy and concluded that the dead were victims not only of the greed of the company that operated the vessel, Van Schaik's poor decision, the cowardice of many crew members, and the corruption of Tammany Hall officials whose safety inspections of the vessel had taken place on paper only, the women of New York City and some other enlightened members of the public arrived at an even broader conclusion. While greed and corruption had certainly played a role in the tragedy, so too did an outdated and oppressive set of social mores that discouraged women from learning how to swim and take control of their own destiny. Most of those who had known how to swim—mostly male crew members and young men and boys—had survived. Those who did not know how to swim—mothers and young women and girls—had not.
It was murder, pure and simple—death by repression. They had been murdered as surely as if they had been tied to one another, fer ried far offshore, weighed down with stones, and dropped into the depths. The broken hoses, tattered life jackets, and inaccessible lifeboats did not, in the end, matter as much as the oppressive moral climate that prevented women from learning one of the most basic skills of survival. They never had a chance.
That realization, like a pebble dropped in the water that sends out a single small ripple, would, over time, grow into a mighty wave that would lift all women, sending one, Trudy Ederle, across the English Channel.
2. The Challenge
MARKED BY LAND'S END on the southwest coast of England and the Strait of Dover to the east, the English Channel stretches some 350 miles in length, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that joins the Atlantic to the North Sea. Relatively shallow, with a depth that generally varies between 500 and 150 feet in mid-Channel, at its widest point the Channel is more than 150 miles across. Yet at its narrowest, the Strait of Dover between the English city of Dover and the French city of Calais, the Channel is only twenty-one miles wide. In good weather, one can stand on either shore and see across to the other side, making the crossing of the Channel a tantalizing prospect.
There are no witnesses to the first human crossing of the English Channel, no ancient account of daring celebrated in poetry or some other epic. Yet for as long as human beings have gazed across the English Channel toward the thin strip of land on the opposite horizon, they have dreamed of crossing it. Sometime after the last ice age ended nearly ten thousand years ago, the first boat crossing was made in a boat carved by means of stone tools from a great earthen log. This first trip was likely an accidental excursion that began in coastal marshes and pools in pursuit of game and fish before a rising tide and too-strong current pulled the boat and its occupants into the sea. After a number of hours or days adrift, they came to rest across the Channel on the opposite shore, where they were likely greeted with hostility by local residents, if not attacked and killed on the spot.
Over time, as boatbuilding and navigational skills increased, human beings learned to make this journey on purpose, and scholars agree that by 2000 B.C. cross-Channel human contact was a more or less regular occurrence. Yet even as these crossings became commonplace, they were never without danger.
If one of these intrepid early travelers were knocked or swept overboard, unless he or she was able to grasp onto something that floated and reboard the vessel, death in the cold Channel waters was only a few moments away. If the entire ship was swamped and sunk, unless the vessel was very close to shore, exposure to the water meant certain death. That is because in all likelihood these early travelers shared the same deficit as the passengers on the Slocum— they could not swim. That ability was as lost and unavailable to them as the ability to breathe underwater or fly through the air like a bird.
Unlike many of our relatives in the animal kingdom, human beings, like other primates, cannot swim by instinct. Although a human baby will instinctively hold its breath when submerged and move about as if still immersed in amniotic fluid, the infant will make no attempt to surface and breathe. By the ti
me children are only a year or two old, most have lost the instinct to hold their breath, which is why there are labels on buckets and pails that warn parents against leaving young children alone in proximity to anything that can hold even a few inches of water. Even a few moments under water can be enough to cause drowning.
Nevertheless, in some other, mostly warmer parts of the globe, human beings have been swimming for thousands of years, a skill they probably learned while looking for food along the shore and in the shallows. The earliest visual depiction of swimmers dates from the Stone Age, and swimmers are depicted on clay seals and bas-reliefs that date back to the beginning of civilization itself, as the Egyptians, Minoans, Assyrians, Greeks, and many other ancient cultures were known to swim, some apparently even using a version of the now familiar overarm stroke known as the "crawl" or, more commonly today, the "freestyle" stroke. In ancient Greece, surrounded by the warm waters of the Mediterranean, the swimming tradition was such a central part of Greek lifestyle and culture that one could not hold public office unless one knew how to swim.
After the fall of Greece, swimming remained popular under Roman rule, and, as the Roman Empire spread to Europe, the knowledge of how to swim, like that of sailing, was one of many cultural improvements exported to the nether reaches of the empire. In fact, a Marseilles-based Greek named Pitheas made the first known voyage by sail into the English Channel, and for the next two thousand years the boat remained the only way possible to cross the Channel.
Yet even as the Romans conquered most of western Europe, they did not pass on their knowledge of how to swim to the local population, and after Rome fell in the fourth century and the empire fractured and split apart, the ability to swim became an ever more elusive skill known to only a select few. To most Europeans, particularly of the peasant class, large bodies of water came to be objects of fear, the domain of monsters and other beasts real and imagined. Even smaller bodies of water such as rivers, streams, and swamps were viewed warily, the domain of unhealthy vapors and the cause of mysterious fevers, illnesses, and unexplained disappearances.
