1904 жылғы «General Slocum» қайығының апатты оқиғасы

Passenger steamboat; sank in New York City in 1904

The PS General Slocum was a sidewheel passenger steamboat built in Brooklyn, New York, in 1891. During her service history, she was involved in a number of mishaps, including multiple groundings and collisions. On June 15, 1904, General Slocum caught fire and sank in the East River of New York City. At the time of the accident, she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (German Americans from Little Germany, Manhattan) to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 out of the 1,342 people on board died. The General Slocum disaster was the worst maritime disaster of the 20th century until the Titanic surpassed it eight years later in 1912. It remains the worst maritime disaster in New York City history, and the second worst on United States waterways, after the explosion and sinking of the steamboat Sultana, and until the September 11 attacks in 2001 was the deadliest manmade disaster of any sort in the New York area. The events surrounding the General Slocum fire have been explored in a number of books, plays, and movies.

quotebox |align=right |width=25em |text=The evidence before the Commission establishes the fact that the master made no attempt whatsoever to fight the fire, to examine its condition, or to control, assure, direct, or aid the passengers in any way whatever. An essential fact of negligence is the utter failure of the master to fight the fire or aid the passengers. In a less degree the pilots, in the same manner, after beaching the boat, and while there were still many passengers on board, failed in their duty to assist and rescue the said passengers. Very little assistance was given or control exercised by any of the officers or crew on behalf of the passengers. |source=Slocum Report (1904) He was the only person convicted. He was found guilty on one of three charges: criminal negligence, for failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers. The jury could not reach a verdict on the other two counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. He spent three years and six months at Sing Sing prison before he was paroled. President Theodore Roosevelt declined to pardon Van Schaick. Van Schaick was finally released when the federal parole board under the William Howard Taft administration voted to free him on August 26, 1911. He was pardoned by President Taft on December 19, 1912; the pardon became effective on Christmas Day. After his death in 1927, Schaick was buried in Oakwood Cemetery (Troy, New York). The Knickerbocker Steamship Company, which owned the ship, paid a relatively small fine despite evidence that they might have falsified inspection records. The disaster motivated federal and state regulation to improve the emergency equipment on passenger ships. The neighborhood of Little Germany, which had been in decline for some time before the disaster as residents moved uptown, and 46 identified victims buried in Green Wood Cemetery, both in Brooklyn. Many victims were buried at Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens (now Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery) where an annual memorial ceremony is held at the historical marker. In 1906, a marble memorial fountain was erected in the north central part of Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies, with the inscription: "They are Earth's purest children, young and fair." The sunken remains of General Slocum were salvaged and converted into a 625 gross register ton barge named Maryland, which sank in the South River in 1909 and again in the Atlantic Ocean off the southeast coast of New Jersey near Strathmere and Sea Isle City during a storm on December 4, 1911, while carrying a cargo of coal. All four people aboard Maryland survived the sinking. The victims included one Emily Ziegler, the girlfriend of a saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank who later suffered a mental breakdown culminating in an attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt.

On January 26, 2004, the last surviving passenger from General Slocum, Adella Wotherspoon (née Liebenow), died at the age of 100. At the time of the disaster, she was a six month old infant. Wotherspoon was the youngest survivor of the tragedy that took the lives of her two older sisters. When she was one year old, she unveiled the Steamboat Fire Mass Memorial on June 15, 1905, at Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens. Before Wotherspoon's death, the previous oldest survivor was Catherine Connelly (née Uhlmyer) (1893–2002) who was 11 years old at the time of the accident.