The Tempest

Jammed aboard the U. S. liner President Harding when she cleared from Le Verdon, near Bordeaux, France on Oct.11 were 597 passengers (157 more than her capacity), 330 of them U. S. citizens. West of Ireland, Captain James E. Roberts turned to rescue the French tanker W. Emile Miguet, which radioed that it had been attacked by a submarine. On his way to her rescue he picked up 36 members of the crew of the British freighter Heronspool, which had also been torpedoed. He finally found the Miguet in flames, could see no sign of the crew, and resumed his course westward. (Word came later that the Miguet's crew had been rescued by the Black Diamond freighter Black Hawk.)

Roberts ordered the overcrowded President Harding hove to in mounting seas in the Stygian night of Oct. 17. That he was in the vicinity of the hurricane, he knew. But British ships had ceased broadcasting weather reports, which might betray their location to submarines, and he had no specific reports of the storm's path which might have enabled him to avoid it. The President Harding, now actually 200 miles east of the hurricane's core, was suddenly buffeted by a no-mile-an-hour wind, floundered in a sea which rolled up into a single mountainous wave that struck her broadside.

On her high bridge, Roberts had time to glance aloft, see the sky blotted out by the crest of the wave before it broke over them, hurled men the entire length of the bridge. Small sounds in the Niagara thunder of the blow were the smashing of glass, furniture, superstructure, screams of passengers that the ship was going down, shrieks of the injured.

Cabin Boy Paul Johnson, who had just emerged from the "glory hole," was swept overboard clutching a shipmate's spectacles. Steward Schwerdtfeger grasped Mrs. William Buckler by one foot just as she was going over the rail. In the ship's hospital Dr. Thomas Fister was sent spinning with bottles, instruments, in water up to his knees, staggered back to aid the engine-room storekeeper, whose appendix he had just removed. Paul van Zeeland, former Premier of Belgium, in his cabin with his wife and four children, was knocked unconscious. A kettle of boiling water and grease engulfed Fred Stover, chief butcher. Mrs. Tatiana Sztybel, refugee from the siege of Warsaw, was hurled against a wall like a rag doll, left moaning with a badly injured spine. In the smoking room, where water poured through shattered ports, men and women and furniture were piled in a jumbled heap while the precipitous floor turned slick with blood and water.

For what seemed minutes the 13,869-ton liner stayed down on her side, virtually at the point of capsizing, before she slowly righted herself and began a sickening roll.

It was almost dawn before the sea abated, the 73 most seriously injured administered to, black eyes, minor hurts treated, and the confusion partially unscrambled. Summoned by radio, the Coast Guard cutter Alexander Hamilton put medical supplies aboard by means of a rocket gun and line.

After ten days of a nightmare voyage the President Harding steamed into New York Harbor, flag at half-mast for Cabin Boy Johnson, and while three uninjured members of the ship's band played The Sidewalks of New York, warped into her pier, where 18 ambulances waited, rushed 26 to hospitals. From her hold were removed 25 automobiles, most of them virtual wrecks, to be towed away.

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