A Fire to Remember

FIRE AT SEA (280 pp.)--Thomas Gallagher--Rinehart ($4).

On the night of Sept. 7, 1934, the fast, modern cruise ship Mono Castle of the Ward Line was bucking into a stiff northeaster off the New Jersey coast. It was the last night out before docking in New York, but a pall had fallen on the ship. At suppertime, Captain Robert Wilmott had been found in his bathtub, dead. Festivities were canceled, and by 2:50 a.m., only a few diehards among the 321 passengers were still drinking in the smoking room and in the lounge when someone noticed a wisp of smoke coming from a locker in the writing room. Within half an hour, the superstructure was a mass of roaring flames, and passengers were dropping from the sides like ants from a burning log. Next day, the still smoldering hulk drifted onto the beach at Asbury Park, and 126 bodies lay in the sullen seas.

The Morro Castle's story was a tragedy of confusion, negligence and stupidities. Only perfunctory fire drills had been held so as not to alarm the passengers. Discipline was poor. The bosun, who should have led the fire fighters, was drunk in his bunk. The chief engineer never went to his post in the engine room, but scrambled into the nearest lifeboat and ordered it lowered, even though it was less than a quarter full. The first five half-empty lifeboats (of a total of six that reached shore) carried 92 members of the crew and only six passengers.

Hero? One hero stood out amidst the confusion: pudgy, genial Chief Radio Operator George W. Rogers, who sat in his radio shack, a wet towel wrapped around the lower part of his face to allow him to breathe in the stifling smoke, his feet propped on the rungs of his chair to keep them off the hot deck, waiting for authority from the distracted first officer to send an S O S. He finally got the order and sent off his message, staggered to safety on the forecastle deck, was carried ashore on a stretcher. Newspapers and passengers acclaimed him. He even launched a lecture tour, resplendent in white uniform, re-creating his heroic deed for vaudeville audiences.

Later Rogers fell on evil days. He joined the police force in Bayonne, N.J., then was convicted of trying to blow up his immediate superior with an ingenious bomb. Paroled during the war, he eventually set up a radio repair shop, made friends with an elderly couple. The evening they drew out their savings--having planned to move to Florida--they were bludgeoned to death in their house. Rogers was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1958, to a chorus of obituaries mourning the hero of the Morro Castle who had gone bad.

Commissioned to do for the Morro Castle what Walter (A Night to Remember) Lord did for the Titanic, Author Thomas Gallagher had duly cast Rogers in the conventional role of hero. Two years before Rogers died, Gallagher called on him in prison, became convinced that "this was a man who was capable of anything." Curiously enough, through all the myriad investigations, no one had thoroughly investigated Rogers' past. Author Gallagher (The Gathering Darkness, The Monogamist) began to dig into it, came to the startling conclusion that the hero of the Morro Castle actually set the fire, and was in fact a psychopathic arsonist.

Villain? Gallagher found that Rogers had a history of crime dating back to the age of twelve. His record included several juvenile arrests for sodomy, theft and suspicion of arson. The year after the Morro Castle fire, Rogers' own repair shop in Bayonne burned and he collected insurance; his prison record later showed that he had set the fire himself. Rogers was also fascinated with chemical gadgets, liked to expound his theory that the Black Tom explosion of 1916 near Bayonne could have been set off by a fountain-pen incendiary gadget filled with acid and other chemicals.

Author Gallagher speculates that the Morro Castle fire might have been set by just such a device--that the speed with which it spread pointed to arson. There was also the mystery of the gasoline tanks outside Rogers' radio shack--someone had uncoupled the outlet, letting the gasoline stream over the deck. Gallagher thinks it was Rogers, intent on spreading the fire.

A passenger testified that Captain Wilmott had expressed suspicion of Rogers, announced that he planned to fire him as soon as the ship reached New York. Gallagher even suggests that Rogers might have poisoned the captain to preclude this possibility.

Fire at Sea has some terrible and memorable vignettes--the naked woman, stuck halfway through a porthole at her hips, screaming; the man who leaned on the rail, smoking calmly as the fire crept closer to him; the mysterious man who boarded the hulk at Asbury Park by breeches buoy, made his way to a certain cabin once occupied by a Brooklyn woman, methodically sifted through her charred effects and remains searching for her diamonds, pocketed them, then quietly disappeared. Gallagher's case against Rogers is necessarily circumstantial, and not wholly convincing. But where else can a reader find a disaster at sea combined with a fascinating whodunit?

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