(2 of 2)
Into Manhattan's gloomy Bellevue Morgue the following night crowded friends & relatives to identify their dead. Moving about among the sheet-covered bodies Dr. Charles E. Norris, the city's longtime Chief Medical Examiner, lifted a sheet, quickly put it down again. "My God!" cried Dr. Norris. "It's Mrs. Peabody. I knew her well." Few minutes later Mrs. Peabody's brother, famed Poloist Tommy Hitchcock Jr., claimed her body and that of her husband, Manhattan Architect Julian L. Peabody. Other notable victims: Professor Herdman Fitzgerald Cleland of Williams College, in charge of a student paleontological expedition to Yucatan; three Williams seniors, including Manhattan Socialite William Dwight Symmes; Rev. Dr. Francis L. Frost, longtime rector of St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church, Staten Island. Notable survivors included two daughters of Charles Stinson Pillsbury, Minneapolis flour tycoon.
Score: dead & missing, 45 (15 passengers, 30 crew).
Because it was not merely a shipwreck but the culmination of a series of disasters to Ward Line ships, the sinking of the Mohawk last week left the country aghast. Only five months ago the Morro Castle, her captain mysteriously dead, caught fire and burned with a loss of 124 lives (TIME, Sept. 17). Last week she was still beached off Asbury Park. N. J. Last month off Florida the Havana for no good reason went aground 20 miles off her course (TIME, Jan. 14). That a third major disaster should befall the Ward Line last week was regarded as almost incredibly fantastic.
It seemed no less incredible to the Mohawk's surviving officers. Chief Officer Pedersen, who had been below when the vessels struck, told a Federal Steamboat Inspection Board in Manhattan: "I've been thinking and thinking and thinking, and I can't explain it."
Equally baffled was Chief Engineer Martin: "I simply can't account for it."
Conflicting testimony was offered as to whether the Mohawk's automatic steering mechanism had failed. Chief Officer Pedersen said Captain Wood told him it had. Chief Engineer Martin said this was news to him. Quartermaster Mardy Polander said that not only had the wheel been "tough to handle," but that 20 minutes before the collision "it was impossible to keep the Mohawk on her course." Against this Deck Engineer Snyder reported he had tested the steering mechanism ten minutes before the crash, and again after it, that on both occasions he found it "a little stiff, but all right in every way." Second Assistant Engineer Parry testified that the Mohawk's steering motor had frozen during cold weather a year ago, forced the helmsman to bring her into port with the emergency hand steering gear. But he was sure it had not frozen last week.
With Captain Wood dead, it began to look as if the secret of the Mohawk disaster would remain buried with him in twelve fathoms off Seagirt, N. J.