Anchors Away

Spirits were high that summer’s day as everyone boarded the General Slocum. The passengers were looking forward to their annual picnic just up river… but as fate would have it, they’d never arrive

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Monkey. The Sultana was a
beautiful steamboat, up hulking vessel of wood and paddle wheels.

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She was only about two years old, but roughly the
size of a football field and featured twin smokestacks from
which hung a pair of elk antlers. They were given
to her as a trophy for being the fastest boat around.
She was also a workhorse. The Sultana was originally built
to fairy cotton, but when the Civil War broke out,

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she got a new assignment. She became tasked with ferrying
Union troops and supplies up and down the Mississippi River.
In time, she'd begin carrying that cotton again alongside passengers
from New Orleans to her home in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Her captain, a man by the name of James Mason,
was proud of her contributions to the war efforts and

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how well she continued to provide an integral lifeline to
communities up and down the river. And when he got
word of Abraham Lincoln's death, he decided that he was
going to once again put her speed to the test.
He wanted to be the first boat in New Orleans
to break the news of the President's assassination. So off
they went, a captain and his ship sailing downstream bearing

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bad news. A quick stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi was meant
to address the Sultanah's boiler issues, which seemed to be
exacerbated under the quick pace of her run. While he
was there, Captain Mason received a lucrative offer. The Union
Army wanted him and his ship to ferry home. Their
prisoners of war are recently released from Confederate hands, and

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they would pay him well. He opted into the deal
and decided he had better get moving. A decision was
made too simply patched the boilers, rather than spending time
in port executing more meticulous and costly repairs. The Sultana
was steadfast. What hurt could come from one quick run,

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So Captain Mason loaded the Sultana, stuffing her holds and
decks with about twenty two hundred men, more than sixteen
hundred over her capacity. Each man had a price on
his head, and the money math made it hard for
him to see that he had made a very fatal
miscalculation with his newly sprung charges on board, men who

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had seen horrors the young country had never before witnessed,
and lived through it all. The Sultana set off northbound
into the cold spring thaw. The ship creaked, the wheels
churned laboriously, the boiler strained, and the men slept, and
at just about two in the morning, she gave way.

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Unable to take what was being asked of her, the
Sultanah's first boiler gave out and exploded. This set off
a chain reaction and caused her other two boilers to
go off like bombs, incinerating the sleeping people in her hold.
Her shrapnel flew in all directions, and boiling water from
her belly effectively cooked men to death. Those who managed

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to survive began to swim. They clawed their way through
the cold, shopping waves, aiming for shore. They pulled themselves
up on the river's banks, having landed in the former
Confederate territory of Arkansas. For men still wearing their Union uniforms,
this could have been a second fright, but instead they
found something entirely different, a sense of unity and humanity

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they hadn't seen in all their time. Away for war.
The locals headed for the explosion and ran into the water,
and there they began to fish out the Union soldiers,
bringing them safety. Some quickly built a raft to begin
rescuing men stranded in the remainder of the Sultana's slowly
sinking wreckage. They brought them into their homes and tended

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to the wounded and dying. All in all, historians believe
almost twelve hundred of the twenty two hundred men aboard
the ship died. To this day, it remains among the
deadliest maritime disasters in the United States history. These soldiers
had come so far and were so close to home
after surviving the war. What should have been as celebration

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a homecoming, ended not in another chance at life, but
in their funerals. I'm lorn Vogebaum. Welcome to American shadows.

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From the Lenape to the Dutch, to the British, and
then to the Americans. The spit of land now known
as New York City had long been a hub of trade, culture,
and immigration. Indigenous peoples and colonists like depended on the
area's waterways for fishing, trade, and communication. Traditional birch bark
canoes and other. Smaller vessels were long popular for navigating

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New York's lakes and rivers, while larger boats were necessary
to venture out into the wide open Atlantic. But as
the country was colonized, the ports became even more central
to commerce and immigration. By the turn of the nineteenth century,
hundreds of boats and thousands of people docked in New
York City daily, many of them chasing after stories about

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a certain American dream. For the hopeful folks who survived
the long trip from Europe, and many were left figuring
out their next steps. And many came young and unattached,
hopeful that someone they knew in this new land might
make good on the promise of helping them get started.
Some had no one. Others arrived too, well established communities

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but waiting for them with open arms, and if they
were lucky enough, these seaweary passengers didn't have to go
far from the boat dock. In the case of those
immigrating from Germany, many found themselves a new home in
Klinedeutschland or Little Germany, in the area that's now known
as the Lower East Side. By eighteen fifty five, New

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York City had the third largest German population in any
city worldwide, surpassed only by Berlin in Vienna. Their little
corner of the city burst with the vibrancy of the
old country, the sense of home cooking and comforting dialects
mingling with the unfamiliar sounds and smells of Manhattan's southern point.
It's here that they worked to establish a new rhythm

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of a new life, borrowing enough of the old ways
to feel brave enough to be in this unfamiliar place.
A One of the central ways folks found recipite from
the streets, which were decidedly not paved with gold as promised,
was to join church communities. A Saint Mark's Evangelical Lutheran
Church in the heart of Blindeutschland was one of these places.

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For decades, the church had been the center of the
Little Germany community. Beyond providing prayers and absolution for its parishioners,
it also provided camaraderie in play. And it was on
June fifteenth of nineteen oh four, but the church had
made plans for a long summer day's outing. That morning,
a crowd of mostly women and children were seen off

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by their husbands, who were largely on their way to work.
The general Slocum, a paddle steamer, sat and docked and
ready to ferry folks away for a day of leisure.
It was a treat to have an entire day to themselves,
and since it was just about the beginning of summer,
the days were still growing just a bit longer, if

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only for a little while. The school year had come
to an end. It was a hopeful season. That sunny morning,
over thirteen hundred members of the Saint Mark's community showed up.
The children were dressed in their finest clothes, shouting and
giggling as their mothers corralled them on the docks. Music
from a German band added to the sense of celebration,

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while tiny German flags waved in small hands. As more
families gathered, lugging their baskets of meats and sweets, it
became clear that this was going to be a church
picnic for the ages. They looked upon their boat, and
she was a beautiful thing. The Slocum, to her credit,
was said to be the largest and most splendid excursion

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steamer in the whole state. She was a wooden triple
decker side paddler with a main cabin filled with glossed
wood and red velvet trimmings. Her name was emblazoned in
gold over her white paint. There was an immense sense
of anticipation in getting a chance to take to the
waters on one of these famous pleasure crafts. Just before

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the clock struck ten am, the Slocum rang her bell
and began to pull away from the dock. They were
going north up the East River and heading for a
picnic ground on the north shore of Long Island. On
a good day, which this one very much was. The
trip should take no longer than two hours. The passengers
leaned over the railings, waving to those who remained on shore.

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They laughed as their loved ones and dock workers alike
became specks in the distance, anticipating what lay ahead for
them up river. The Slocum was named after Henry Warner Slocum,

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a distinguished union general, and had been in operation for
thirteen years. However, a series of mishaps in the years
since her commission might have given her passengers pause had
they known about them, and just four months after her
initial launch in eighteen ninety one, she ran aground. She
was okay, but three years later did the same thing.

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This time with thousands of passengers on board, and just
a month after that, a terrible storm ran she and
her passengers aground again near Coney Island, and then later
that year she collided with another ship in eighteen ninety eight,
should have another collision in nineteen o two, she would
run aground one more time, stranding her hundreds of passengers

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overnight until help could come in the morning. How was it, then,
given this track record, that the Slocum was the prize
ship in the Harbor oh During this time, boat accidents
were relatively common, and since so few had been hurt
in her incidents over the years, she continued to paddle on.
This was all part and parcel of the paddle boat experience,

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or so Rider's thought. Her captain, William Van Shake, was
an experienced mariner who knew the New York waterways well.
Of note on this sunny June morning was an infamously
turbulent spot in the river known as the hell Gate.
It had sunk hundreds of ships over the years, but
he knew he had the dexterity and wherewithal to ferry

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his passengers through safely. But as he would soon realize,
this wouldn't be his chief concern of the day. To
his horror, any concern about the hell gate was about
to be overshadowed by something far more sinister. About thirty
minutes into their voyage, the first guests noticed that something
was terribly wrong. A group of children alerted their parents

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that a small fire had started in a room just
below the main deck. A crewman, trying to think, quickly
decided that the best way to put it out would
be to both stomp it and throw handfuls of charcoal
atop the fire to smother it. This, of course, only
fed the flames. Then a scream, and soon a word

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was spreading even faster than the flames, and a general
panic erupted across the decks. The crew on board relatively
untrained on what to do in the event of a fire.
The smoke began to billow near the bow of the boat.
The passengers rushed to the lifeboats and jackets, only to
find that they couldn't be untied. The jackets were old

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and moldering, their job function long expired. Amidst the yells
and footsteps stampeding around the decks, families called for their
loved ones, so began a brutal accounting for as they
gathered their flocks in preparation for what was yet to come.
The ship was barely passing East ninety seventh Street when

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folks on shore spotted the flames, and then the passengers
started tumbling. The people on land watched in horror as
passengers began jumping overboard, and due to the heavy clothes
of the day and many of them lacking swimming experience,
they were bobbing, screaming, and grappling in the current that
was working hard to pull them under and away. People

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at the docks began screaming to the captain, begging him
to turn the boat inward and head to shore. The
distance was short enough that he possibly could have made it.
Captain von Shake made a different decision, though, to take
his chances and gun the Slocum further up the river.
He feared that turning her quickly at an angle perpendicular
to the current would break her steering mechanism. He set

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his sights on the docks at East one hundred and
thirty fourth Street, but before he could get the Slocum there,
he was waved off by a tugboat captain, who feared
that the flames would endanger the shipyard, so Captain von
Shake continued on for another mile, hoping to ground the
ship on North Brother Island. This calculation ultimately fed the flames.

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Because fire needs oxygen, the ship's speed and the day's
wind only encouraged the blaze, which was quickly turning the
paddle boat into a floating inferno. Mothers tossed their children
into the waves and followed in after them. Some held
each other on their way down. The remaining passenger huddled
together in the hopes that they could safely reach land

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if they held out long enough. In time, the middle
deck collapsed, plunging everyone gathered there down into the fire.
It said that in all of this a woman gave birth.
Wanting to save herself and her newborn baby, she pitched
herself and the infant into the churning waters below, never
to surface alive. The doctors and patients of North Brother

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Island expected their day to come and go with the
same sense of isolation as any other. It was a
place where the sick were sent to quarantine, stashed away
from the general populace of New York City. You can
imagine their surprise then, when they found themselves with an
unexpected visitor. Captain Van Shak had grounded the burning slocum

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twenty five feet from shore. Nurses ran to intercept the
boat and her passengers. They dove the waves, pulling whoever
languished there to safety, but they couldn't board the slocum herself,
for the heat was blistering and unbearable. A Mary McCann,
a seventeen year old Irish immigrant, was recovering at the
hospital and just shy of receiving her clean bill of

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health like everyone else on the island. She responded to
the emergency whistle and found herself running towards the fire.
She threw off her shawl and braced herself for the
cold water. She was able to pull a baby from
the waves and six more children before collapsing herself. The
tugboats followed in the Slocum's wake, pulling survivors and dead

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alike from the waters. The beach was soon strewn over
a hundred and fifty bodies laid out peacefully side by side.
The rescuers watched as the slocum finally fully submerged around noon,
only two hours since its journey had begun. Bodies washed ashore.
For days following the disaster, they appeared down the lank

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of the river, accounting for some of the one thousand
and twenty one lives that were lost in the slocan's wake.
The city watched in horror as thousands of people rushed
to the east twenty third Street Pier, which was deputized
as a temporary more open coffins, left the bodies on
full display. Some of those who had died were readily identifiable,

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some were completely bloated, some charred beyond recognition. Men left factories, shops,
and docks in droves to find out if their mothers, sisters,
wives and children had survived. Those who couldn't be identified
were buried together in a mass grave. In the days
after the disaster, Klein Deutschland was a veritable ghost town,

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save for the constant parade of funeral carriages and processions.
It said that the church bells rang almost constantly. Over
six hundred families lost at least one person. For other survivors,
their entire families were gone. I say survivors, but for
those who were left behind, there was so little life left.

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The rest of the city was in an uproar. Everyone
wanted to know how this happened and who to blame.
There were two targets to aim their vitriol at the
Knickerbocker Company, the outfit that owned the ship, and Captain
Von Shaik, who was left physically disabled and blind from
the tragedy, having barely escaped. It was said that he

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was the last person to abandon ship. A formal coroner's
inquest began on June twentieth of nineteen oh four and
featured eight days of testimony from surviving passengers, crew members, rescuers,
and the captain. And while it's true that Van Shaik
was responsible for piloting the ship, it was the Knickerbocker

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Company that was responsible for its upkeep and repairs. They
were quick to point fingers back at the captain, smitting
so very suspicious looking repair receipts to the court. Rumors
of corruption and bribery in the ranks swirled, feeding the
public's frenzy and outcry for justice, and Captain Von Shake
and the company were both found guilty of manslaughter, but

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only Von Shak was brought to trial. It took seventeen
days and Von Shake was found guilty once again. He
went on to serve three years of his ten year
sentence and was later pardoned by President William Taft. Meanwhile,
the steamboat industry drastically overhauled the necessary safety and inspection regulations.

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There would be no happy ending for Klein Deutschland. The
community never recovered. It saw a mass exodus and a
spade of suicides in those who remained. Two years later,
a small child stood in Tompkins Square Park, surrounded by
her remaining friends and family. She had been aboard the

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boat that summer's day and has chosen as the person
to tug the draping off the new General Slocum Memorial Fountain.
It was a small gesture that sought to recognize an
incalculable tragedy. The fabric of the Kleindutchland community had burned
up in the fire, and perhaps this child couldn't remember it,

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but she would go on to hear stories of that
fateful day. There was no way to reconcile what had
happened to her family and friends, but there was hope
that she would be able to carry on without many
of them. After all, she had no other choice. New

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York City continued to be haunted by the General Slocum,
not just because of what had happened, but because of
what still floated in their harbor. There floated the General
Slocum sister ship, the Grand Republic, which was nearly identical.
It was very common to have a fleet of identical ships,
and the Knickerbocker Company did just that. You can imagine

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the jolt New Yorkers felt when they saw her placidly
paddling along, a striking reminder of what and who was
still lost beneath the waters. The Grand Republic was intensely
scrutinized in the wake of the disaster, and even still
the boat operated as planned, or at least tried to.

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It said that a week after the Slocum sank, only
a fourth that the Grand Republic's passengers showed up to
make good on their weekend plans. It was yet another
church outing. Wanting to cut their losses, the Knickerbocker Company
decided to sell the Grand Republic, and just four days
after the sale, the boat crashed into another off the

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coast of Coney Island. Five hundred passengers were aboard the ship,
and while there were no fatalities, they were dismayed to
find similarly rotting life preservers. Eventually the boat was surrendered
for government inspection. Her capacity was lower, and her owners
began losing even more money. More of accidents would follow,

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though thankfully none resulted in death. Even still, it seemed
that riding the paddle boats was a risky business, though
one that passengers still deemed necessary for their day to
day lives. After several years of largely quiet and uninterrupted service,
the Grand Republic went down the same way her sistership had.

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She was taken by fire. On April twenty sixth of
nineteen twenty four. A fire broke out late into the
night while she was docked. Thirty men were asleep on board,
but all awoke in time to flee. She sank into
the Hudson River that night, and despite the association with
the General Slocum and the accidents, she went to her

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own watery grave with some dignity still intact. The New
York Times stated, certainly the Grand Republic was a grand
success as an excursion boat. There's more to this story.
Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all
about it. On September eleventh of two thousand one, all

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of New York City shut down in the city. That day,
two planes creened across the skies and into infamy. Lives ended,
and the world changed. For those on the ground that day,
there was no way to get into the city, and
there were very few ways out. The subway stopped, the
bridges closed, but the water was open. Gregg Freydis was

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a charterboat captain in New York for the summer, and
on that blue Bird morning, after a very late night,
he ambled over to his local coffee shop. As he
strolled in, he took a look at the television and
saw that he had missed something extraordinary. On the news
was a replay of a plane crashing into the World
Trade Center. Like many people that day, he stood stunned.

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But what was he seeing? How could this be happening?
Surely an accident, of course, that's what many thought until
the second plane hit. We know how this story goes.
But then Gregg, like many New Yorkers that day, did
what he had to do. He jumped into action. He
didn't know exactly what was needed from him, but he

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was going to do what he knew how he headed
back to his boat yard. He was one of the
many boat captains who appeared that morning, and armed with
a fierce loyalty for their home and a lot of gumption.
In what seemed like no time at all, they were
met by thousands of people who had migrated to the
water line trying to flee Lower Manhattans smoke and smolder,

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and some were old, some were young, some were bleeding.
Some held their pets and the ash rained down. They
stood shoulder to shoulder on the shore line they wanted off.
The boatmen had the benefit of having keeys and knowing
how to drive. By mid morning, the Coast Guard made
the official call. They asked that all boats and all

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captains available helped with an immediate evacuation effort, and soon
a veritable army of a hundred and thirty watercraft appeared
on the horizon of Lower Manhattan ready to help. There
were troops of ferries and tugboats, fishing boats and multimillion
dollar pleasure yachts and sightseeing ships and emergency service vehicles.

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The Staten Island Ferry alone took more than fifty thousand
people across the river. They docked two waiting ambulances from
Ellice Island to Brooklyn to New Jersey, letting folks disembark
while loading up on supplies to bring back to emergency
efforts in Manhattan. At one point, among an order for
water bottles, boxygen, and food, there was a request for

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twenty thousand body bags. On that day and in the
ones that followed, and his compatriots pulled off the largest
water evacuation in history. It's since been dubbed the nine
to eleven boat Lift. That day, nearly half a million
people were ferried to safety. What was also remarkable about

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the effort, which was nothing short of heroic, is that
not only did they do this without a plan, they
did it amidst utter and complete chaos. It was their
gift to the city, this herculean effort that's sometimes been
overlooked in the telling of the nine to eleven story.
But without a doubt, those who remember pulling away from

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the shoreline that day, knowing that their lives would never
be the same, they were thankful to those boat captains
and the waters that ferried them to safety. American Shadows
as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by

(25:59):
Robin Miniter, researched by Ali Steed, and produced by Miranda
Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams,
and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit
grimmanmile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.