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Steve Nagiweiz, executive director of the Explorers Club, sent a set of coordinates he thought was General Slocum. Steve’s target was also too far off the inlet to be the wreck. Both Gene’s and Steve’s wrecks were found at a water depth between forty and fifty feet. According to the Army Corps’s indicated depth of twenty-four feet off Corson’s Inlet, they were both too deep.
Local divers who were interviewed all said they were expecting the remains of the wreck to be intact and have the appearance of a barge. None was aware of the Army Corps reports, nor did it occur to them that the wreck might be buried.
In late September of 2000, Ralph and Shea McLean set up headquarters in Sea Isle, New Jersey, for the second attempt to find General Slocum/Maryland. Not taking any chances, they expanded the search grid from the old Ludlum Beach Lighthouse beyond Corson’s Inlet. They began a mile and a half from the shore and worked in, ru
The search now turned to targets that did not protrude or reach to the surface. It stood to reason that, if the barge was flattened by explosives as a menace to navigation, there was a better-than-even chance she had worked her way into the bottom silt.
The survey was conducted by towing the sensor of a Geo-metrics cesium magnetometer. Ralph was looking for a magnetic signature that would indicate iron hardware and pins in the original hull. There would be no huge mass, because the engine and boilers had been removed after the tragic fire. The clincher would be the fragments of the coke she was carrying when she sank.
Several small targets were located, but none had the criteria that fit the barge. Eventually, one magnetic anomaly looked promising. Just to be certain, Ralph and Shea continued ru
The last day was spent in performing a magnetic contour of the site. This contour process gave them a rough measurement of the wreckage that worked out to 217 feet by 38 feet, nearly the same known dimensions of General Slocum after she was refitted as the barge Maryland. The site was three miles north of the Ludlum Beach Lighthouse and one mile off Corson’s Inlet, right where the Army Corps of Engineers said it would be.
After returning to Charleston, Ralph took the pieces of what he’d recovered and believed was coke to a gemologist and four professors from the local college. They all agreed that it was indeed coke.
The curtain was drawn on the final act of General Slocum. It was almost as if she’d served penance for that horrible holocaust on a warm summer day in June 1904. Perhaps it was fitting that the once-beautiful ship, the pride of the New York excursion lines, with her glory days far behind her, became a stripped-down barge that was banished to roam the seas for another six years, carrying residue from steel furnaces.
She is still remembered in New York City when descendants of the victims gather at the memorial services held on the a
At the last service, two of the only known survivors still living were present.
PART NINE
S.S. Waratah
I
Disappearing Act 1909
“There is a strange feeling afoot,” Captain Joshua Ilbery said. “Vibrations in the winds.”
The date was July 23, 1909. Waratah was less than an hour from her scheduled stop in Durban, and the trip had not been without incident. As soon as the ship left London on her maiden voyage to Australia via South Africa, Ilbery had noticed her tendency to roll to starboard. The first such twitch had happened on maiden day in the English Cha
“Strange feelings on Waratah?” Second Officer Charles Cheatum joked. “Will wonders never cease.”
Ilbery turned to Cheatum and smiled. If nothing else, his right-hand man had tried to maintain his spirits on the long journey. When Waratah had shuttered off the Azores on the way south, Cheatum had commented that they must have struck a whale. Off Cape Hope, it was a rogue wave. Far in the Indian Ocean, two days from Sydney, the ship had suddenly shook as if she were going to come apart. Cheatum had joked that it was a sudden gust of gravity.
Even so, for all the strange occurrences, Waratah was still steaming.
From Sydney, the ship had called on Melbourne, then Adelaide. There she was reloaded with cargo and passengers for the return to London. All told, the voyage had lasted for eighteen months and should show a profit for the owners of Waratah, the Lund Blue Anchor Line. Profit or not, this would be Ilbery’s last voyage as captain of the vessel. He would be turning over the ship to Cheatum as soon as they reached London. Ilbery believed he had cheated fate one too many times.
Claud Sawyer was in the grips of another nightmare. The apparition had returned. In one hand, the wraith held a medieval sword, in the other hand a bloodstained sheet.
“Away,” Sawyer screamed in his sleep, awakening himself.
Sitting upright in his berth, he struggled to calm himself. Swiveling in the berth, he placed his bare feet on the deck, then reached across to a small table. Grasping a hand towel, he dried the icy sweat from his brow, then sipped from a half-full glass of water. Rising to his feet, he took a few steps to the brass porthole and stared through the circle.
“Land,” he said to himself, staring at the cliffs near the port of Durban. “God, I miss you so.”
Reaching for his shirt and pants, he quickly dressed and walked toward the door to the outer deck. Once he opened the door, he stared back at his berth. An outline of his body in sweat, thick torso and twin lines where his legs had lain, was evident on the cotton-padded berth cushion. The design resembled the bloody outline on the sheet clutched by the apparition. Sawyer grabbed his single suitcase and hurried from his cabin. He would watch the docking from deck. Durban was to be his final stop.
Captain Charles Deroot stared at the approaching ship from the pilothouse of his tugboat Transkei.
“Ugly spud,” he said to his deckhand.