On the morning of 15 June 1904, the excursion paddle steamer PS General Slocum caught fire on New York City’s East River while carrying a chartered church outing, and burned so fast that an estimated 1,021 of the roughly 1,342 people aboard died. The dead were overwhelmingly the women and children of St Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, a German-immigrant congregation from Manhattan’s Little Germany, bound for a picnic on Long Island. It was the deadliest day in New York City’s history until the September 2001 attacks, and the worst loss of life on American inland waters.
The Slocum was a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamer built in 1891, about 264 feet long, operated by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company. She had been chartered for the day. A fire broke out forward, in a lamp room or storage compartment packed with combustible material, and spread through the dry wooden vessel within minutes. The captain, William Van Schaick, kept the ship moving upriver into a headwind that fanned the flames rather than running her immediately aground, and steered for North Brother Island some distance ahead. By the time she beached, the fire had consumed much of the vessel.
What turned a fire into a mass-casualty disaster was the state of the ship’s life-saving equipment and the unpreparedness of her crew. The cork life preservers were more than a decade old and had rotted; many disintegrated or, weighted and waterlogged, dragged people under rather than holding them up. The six lifeboats were inaccessible — reportedly wired and painted in place — and could not be launched. The fire hose was cheap and rotten and burst when pressure was applied. The crew had never been drilled and abandoned the firefighting effort. Over all of this sat the federal Steamboat-Inspection Service, whose inspector had recently certified the decayed equipment as sound.
The disaster was investigated by a US Commission of Investigation appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, which reported in October 1904. It found a chain of organisational and oversight failures: defective and decayed equipment, an untrained crew, the master’s failure to beach the ship promptly, and the inspection service’s failure to do its job. Eight people were indicted; only Captain Van Schaick was convicted, sentenced in 1906 to ten years for failing to maintain the fire drills and equipment the law required. The disaster drove a tightening of federal steamboat-safety regulation.
In the early hours of 7 April 1990, fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star during an overnight crossing from Oslo, Norway, to Frederikshavn, Denmark, and 159 people died, the large majority of them Norwegian passengers killed by smoke as they slept or tried to flee. The ship did not sink; she was a roll-on/roll-off passenger ferry that had entered Oslo–Frederikshavn service only days earlier, and the fire that gutted her accommodation decks was the disaster. It remains one of the deadliest peacetime maritime catastrophes in Scandinavian history, and — uniquely among the great ferry losses — its cause has never been settled to the satisfaction of the official bodies that examined it.
The fire was, by every official account, deliberately set: it began in bedding left in a corridor, and the investigators agreed it had to have been ignited by a person rather than by an electrical or mechanical fault. From there, the certainty stops. In the days after the disaster, Norwegian and Danish police attributed the fire to a Danish lorry driver, a passenger with prior arson convictions who himself died in the blaze. That attribution was never tested in a courtroom because the named man was dead, and it would later be formally withdrawn. A separate strand of analysis argued that several fires were set at different times and places — implying more than one hand — and a privately funded foundation went further, alleging crew involvement and an insurance motive. None of this was ever proven.
What is not disputed is that the ship was a death trap before anyone struck a match. The joint Scandinavian Commission of Inquiry — appointed by Norway, Sweden and Denmark — found in 1991 that the Scandinavian Star was unfit to sail: her crew were newly assembled, unable to communicate in a common language, untrained in the ship’s drills, and unfamiliar with her layout; the wall and ceiling laminates released hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide as they burned. On the basis of those organizational failings, a Danish court in 1993 convicted the shipowner, the operating director and the Norwegian captain. But on the central question — who started the fire and why — the Norwegian record today is one of acknowledged uncertainty: a Norwegian police reopening cleared the original named suspect in 2014, and a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, concluded in 2018 that no sabotage or foul play could be proven.
This case file therefore presents not a single verdict but the verdicts of each body in sequence. The Finding is recorded here, accurately, as Undetermined.