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A noted rescuer was Governor Arthur Harry Moore of New Jersey. Awakening at his summer home in Sea Girt, he found a major disaster had occurred in his State's front yard. He hopped out of bed, piled into a National Guard plane, went roaring seaward. Leaning as far out of his cockpit as his safety belt allowed, he scanned the grey waters for survivors, waved a red flag at boatmen whenever he saw a bobbing head.
Meanwhile the fiery Morro Castle had staged a last sensation. With twelve officers and men, Captain Warms finally abandoned ship and his helpless, wallowing vessel, pounded by heavy seas, lurched broadside on Asbury Park Beach late Saturday afternoon. Grounded 15 ft. deep in sand, the ship swung her stern within 50 yd. of the resort's convention hall. There she lay for days, a fiery hull, emitting smoke and sparks, while countless thousands stood on the beach and gawped.
Working fast but carefully, the Ward Line compiled these statistics: Of the 550 passengers and crew, 137 were dead or missing. Of the 102 bodies recovered, five remained unidentified.
As usual in all great marine catastrophes, Lloyd's of London will have to pay the Ward Line some $3,000,000 in insurance while smaller underwriters who share the loss make up the balance. But who was to share the blame for the 137 dead and lost?
Because most of the people who got away from the Morro Castle in her own boats turned out to be members of the crew, explanations seemed in order. According to some lifeboatmen, a "mysterious outward draft of air" seemed to surround the blazing vessel, blowing them back when they tried to row in for survivors, so that one lifeboat with a capacity of 70 reached shore containing four. Other seamen explained that many of the passen gers were too seasick to make the effort to escape. Still others said that "too much modesty" sent night-gowned women back to their cabins.
Inquiry by the U. S. Bureau of Steam boat Inspection was not long coming. The lines from his eyes cut clear down to his drooping mouth, Captain Warms told Assistant Director Dickerson N. Hoover that the Morro Castle's automatic fire alarm system had failed to work. Fire bulkheads, he testified, were not closed: passengers would have been trapped. He believed that the crew did its best to get passengers to lifeboats, were unable to save only those who were "trapped" and "six or seven women drunk in their state rooms." He had no first hand information about the fire's origin, but suspected from what an officer had reported to him that "the fire was set by someone." A locker in the ship's writing room mysteriously "blew out as if it were fed by gasoline or kero sene." The officer whom Acting Captain Warms sent to investigate testified the fire "rushed out of the closet. ... It looked like it was set on fire." The officer .on watch suggested: "Maybe some mental de fective set the fire to see how much fun it would cause." Other witnesses likewise thought the fire was deliberate because it seemed to break out in several places at once, burn so fiercely.