Крушение лайнера «Морро Касл»

American ocean liner

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Cut off by the fire amidships, passengers tended to move toward the stern. Most crew members, on the other hand, moved to the forecastle.

The rescuers were slow to react. The first rescue ship to arrive on the scene was Andrea F. Luckenbach. Two other ships—Monarch of Bermuda and City of Savannah—were slow in taking action after receiving the SOS but eventually did arrive on the scene. The fourth ship to participate in the rescue operations was , which launched a motor boat that made a cursory circuit around the Morro Castle and, upon seeing nobody in the water along her route, retrieved her motor boat and left the scene. The Coast Guard vessels and positioned themselves too far away to see the victims in the water and rendered little assistance. The Coast Guard's aerial station at Cape May, New Jersey, failed to send their float planes until local radio stations started reporting that dead bodies were washing ashore on the New Jersey beaches, from Point Pleasant Beach to Spring Lake. In time, additional small boats arrived on the scene. The large ocean swells presented a major problem, making it very difficult to see people in the water. A plane piloted by Harry Moore, Governor of New Jersey and Commander of the New Jersey Guard, helped boats to find survivors and bodies by dipping its wings and dropping markers. The fires continued to smoulder for the next two days and, in the end, 135 passengers and crew (out of a total of 549) were lost. The ship was declared a total loss, and its charred hulk was finally towed away from the Asbury Park shoreline on March 14, 1935. According to one account, it later started settling by the stern and sank while being towed and had to be refloated. (Other accounts have it that the ship was towed without any issues). Regardless, it was towed to Gravesend Bay and then to Baltimore on March 29, 1935, where it was scrapped.

The design of the ship, the materials used in her construction, and questionable crew practices and mistakes escalated the on board fire to a roaring inferno that would eventually destroy the ship.

As far as the materials used in her construction were concerned, the elegant but highly flammable decor of the ship—veneered wooden surfaces and glued ply paneling—helped the fire to spread quickly.

The New York Times reported the end of the inquiry on March 27, 1937, with an order by Federal Judge John C. Knox affixing liability at $890,000, an average of $2,225 per victim. About half the claims were for deaths. The order reportedly included agreement by 95% of the claimants. The order also barred further claims against the steamship company and its subsidiary, the Agwi Navigation Company, operators of the vessel. Several months' work remained in deciding each claim individually by the lawyer members of the Morro Castle Committee. Damages were fixed under the Death on the High Seas Act.

Officially, the fire's cause was never determined. In the mid 1980s, HBO television aired a dramatization of the fire in an episode of their Catastrophe series, titled "The Mystery of the Morro Castle". The dramatization starred John Goodman as Radio Officer George Rogers and blamed Rogers for causing the fire. In 2002, the A&E television network made a documentary about the incident. Both the HBO dramatization and the A&E documentary reawakened speculation that the fire was actually arson committed by a crew member. Other theories included a short circuit in the wiring that passed through the rear of the locker, the spontaneous combustion of chemically treated blankets in the locker, or an overheating of the ship's one functioning funnel, situated just aft of the locker. Furthermore, Cuban writer Renée Méndez Capote was aboard when the tragedy happened, en route to New York City where she would travel to Paris to take over administration of the Cuban Consulate there. Trapped in her cabin as the ship became engulfed in flames, she was found by crew members. Because of her corpulence, she had to be removed through a hatch. American steward Carol Prior gave her his flotation device, thereby saving her life. Upon her arrival in New York City, she was interviewed by the American press. Because she expressed sympathy with the Cuban communist party, she was accused of being a "communist agitator" and the author of the fire that destroyed the ship. Capote later declared, “That fire is—undoubtedly—the worst memory I've ever had."

Some victims of the fire are buried in the Mount Prospect Cemetery in Neptune, New Jersey, along the coast.

The Morro Castles radio call sign, KGOV, is still registered to the ship by the FCC nearly 90 years after her demise, and is therefore unavailable for use by broadcast stations.

On September 8, 2009, the first and only memorial to the victims, rescuers, and survivors of the Morro Castle disaster was dedicated on the south side of Convention Hall in Asbury Park, very near the spot where the burned out hull of the ship finally came aground. The day marked the 75th anniversary of the disaster. The Morro Castle ship's bell is now at SUNY Maritime's Fort Schuyler.

In September 2023, the Morro Castle's 5 ton Baldt anchor was recovered from the water in Point Pleasant Beach in New Jersey.

The first artists to remember the tragedy of the Morro Castle were the members of the Trio Matamoros of Santiago de Cuba, with the song "El desastre del Morro Castle" (1934). The Morro Castle disaster occurred when the musical Anything Goes, a comedy set aboard an ocean liner, was about to open. Under the circumstances, the producers decided that going ahead would be in bad taste, and cancelled the opening. The musical was then subjected to several rewrites before finally opening later in 1934. In 1970, the West Coast music critic Philip Elwood described the early Bruce Springsteen led, and Asbury Park based, Steel Mill as "the first big thing that's happened to Asbury Park since the good ship Morro Castle burned to the waterline of that Jersey beach in '34".

The ship is referenced in Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy, published in 1938. The ship provided inspiration for William Burroughs' "Twilight's Last Gleamings", a version of which was published in his Nova Express. The ship is referenced in William H. Gass’s novel The Tunnel. The ship is the main focal point in Chanel Cleeton’s novel The Cuban Heiress. The ship disaster is covered in the article "Pleasure Cruise for 137 Corpses" "Sheldon Lord" (Lawrence Block) published in REAL MEN November 1958.