The number a passenger steamer might carry was, in 1915, the decision of two men. Section 4450 of the Revised Statutes gave the board of local inspectors, one of hulls and one of boilers, the duty of fixing it at each annual inspection, and gave nobody the right of appeal. “The law places the responsibility for determining the passenger allowances upon the local board,” Secretary Redfield told the lieutenant governor of Illinois when he proposed a board of appeal made of mayors; “That would be absolutely illegal.” His solicitor added that the statute’s purpose had been “to localize the authority where the men were supposed to be best posted and informed as to the conditions.” The Eastland’s number was fixed by three local boards in twelve years, at Chicago, at Cleveland and at Grand Haven, and the record of what each of them did is the clearest account there is of how the thing was done.
Chicago, 1903 to 1906
Ira Mansfield had been inspector of hulls at Chicago for twelve years when he testified to Redfield’s board in August 1915, and he began at the beginning. “This board made the first annual inspection of the steamer Eastland in 1904. We granted her, in 1903, the first excursion permit she received, at which time we allowed her 2,800 people, as I remember.” The basis was deck space. At the annual inspection of 24 June 1904, he and his colleague Roy Peck measured the deck allotted to passengers and found “over 30,000 square feet,” and “considering this, together with the model and stability of the vessel, we considered her perfectly safe for a total of 3,300 passengers.” The certificate of that date allowed 375 regular and 2,925 excursion passengers, a total of 3,300. They had examined her twice in dry dock and thought her “of a good model and well built.”
Then came the Sunday of 17 July 1904 and the listing off South Haven, with Mansfield aboard. The letter the board wrote to the owners the next day blamed the ballast and the roof: no more than 500 people were to be allowed on the upper deck, “the approximate weight of which number would not be over 37½ tons.” On 26 July the board cancelled the permit for 3,300, after “one month and two days,” and issued one for 2,800. The reason Mansfield gave in 1915 was not safety. The Eastland and her rival the City of South Haven had been “doing a lot of advertising,” and the Eastland’s manager had told the public that “while they were allowed by the Government inspectors to carry a total of 3,300 people, still they said to the public: ‘We will never carry over 3,000 people.’ We took it for granted that if they were so liberal and didn’t care to carry that many people we said we would arrange it so you can not carry any more people than 3,000 people.” To Washington, answering a passenger’s complaint, the board wrote that it had substituted a permit for 2,300 (the figure as the hearing print has it; the certificate itself says 2,800), “not because we considered the steamer unsafe with 3,300 passengers, but to avoid any further complaints about the steamer’s being uncomfortably crowded.”
In 1905 and 1906 the Chicago board gave her 3,000, and she carried it. Peck, who had left the service and was by 1915 an engineer with a dredging company, was asked by Redfield whether the removal of her staterooms since then, forty-nine in the winter of 1904 and 1905 and the rest at Cleveland, had made her more or less able to carry a load. “More able.” So, Redfield summed up, “whereas the steamer Eastland had, in fact, carried 2,994 persons and had a passenger allowance of 3,000, her record last week was that of being allowed to carry only 2,500 persons, while in the meantime she had been made safer by the removal of the upper weights; is that so?” “Yes, sir; that would be my opinion.” It was the department’s own defence, put into the record on the third day, and it rested on the same instrument as everything else: the number she had carried before.
Cleveland, 1907 to 1913
Nils Nelson, supervising inspector of the ninth district, had the Eastland from 1907. “On June 4, 1907, more than 2,300 newsboys went for a trip out of Cleveland on the boat. They nearly all climbed to the top deck, and I concluded during the trip with them that the boat was a good one and was carrying a good load.” The first excursion certificate at Cleveland allowed 2,200; after watching her at the dock and on the lake he raised it to 2,400; later it went back to 2,200 and, in 1912, down to 2,000. “I would never have granted the boat 2,000, 2,200 or 2,400 if I had thought the water ballast tanks would not be used.” He had talked to her two chief engineers, Grant and Donaldson, and “cautioned these two engineers along with her other officers to use the ballast tanks, and they all agreed with me and promised me to use the tanks.” Asked whether he had told the owners she was unsafe for 2,400 without them, he said no, and gave the department’s view of the matter in a sentence: “You may as well tell a man: ‘We will grant you 2,000 passengers provided you have water in your boilers,’ or ‘Provided you keep your side lights lit at night,’ or ‘Provided you have a good wheelsman on duty.’”
The only method he had, he agreed, was “judgment and personal observation and testing with human freight.” He could not calculate metacentric heights with his present force; it took too long; it had never been suggested that he should, and he thought it should be. When the Cleveland papers took the ship up, the owners answered with the advertisement of 9 August 1910 in the Cleveland Leader offering $5,000 to anyone who could prove her unsafe. Nelson remembered it as $1,000 until the paper was put in his hand. “That is open to all the scientific men; and no one took it up that I know of.”
Victor Olander, secretary of the Lake Seamen’s Union, had been collecting the Eastland’s certificates for years, and read some of them to the coroner. From the Cleveland office in 1912 or 1913 he had her allowance as 143 passengers at all times, 653 in the excursion season on open water, and 2,000 “if kept within five miles from land and in waters not sufficient to submerge the vessel in case of disaster.” A document filed with the House Committee on the Merchant Marine, prepared to show what the Seamen’s bill would do to the Lake fleet, gave her 2,120 on Lake Michigan on a route more than five miles out. The figures do not all agree with Nelson’s, and Olander said so: “There may be a slight difference in these figures. I am not sure whether that included the crew.”
Grand Haven, 1914 and 1915
The St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company brought her back to Lake Michigan in 1914, and her inspection passed to the local board at Grand Haven, Robert Reid and Charles Eckliff, who also inspected the company’s other steamer, the Eugene C. Hart. For 1914 they allowed her 2,045. “Her smaller rating last year was governed entirely by her equipment,” Reid said; “she only had the equipment for the persons that she was allowed to carry and they did not buy the boats and rafts and equipment necessary until this year.”
The 1915 season opened with the inspection of the Hart on 5 and 6 May, and with part of a day in hand before the train the inspectors went aboard the Eastland and counted her life preservers: 2,108. On 8 May they wrote to Pedersen “as per agreement with you.” The agreement, Reid explained, “was if the boat was properly equipped with life preservers and rafts for 2,500, she would be allowed that; I have no doubt that is what I meant.” The letter did the sum. Her rafts, by estimate, would carry 405 persons and her lifeboats 159, together 564. Boats and rafts had to accommodate thirty per cent of all aboard, so 564 gave her “from May 15 to October 15, a carrying capacity of 1,880 persons, and as you wish to carry 2,500 passengers, carrying the same crew you had last year, would make a total of 2,570 persons.” Thirty per cent of 2,570 was 771. Of that, 193 had to be in boats, which meant two more lifeboats; the remaining 578 in rafts, which meant rafts for 173 more than she had. She would need 462 more life preservers, plus two for each boat. The letter told the captain how to rate a raft for himself: four square feet of deck and eight cubic feet of air in the cans for each person, and the lower of the two figures governs. And it warned him about the Seamen’s Act: in 1916 half of a steamer’s rafts would have to carry more than fifteen persons each, “and we would advise that in the new rafts you get that they would be in accordance with the seamen’s bill.”
The annual inspection followed in the last week of May, and the board’s letter of 4 June listed what it had found wanting: storm-oil tanks, a deep-sea sounding machine, a can for greasy rags, the safety notices to be framed in the engine room and the pilot house, three stay bolts in the after starboard boiler to be hammered up. On 7 June Pedersen swore his reply before a notary at St. Joseph. The oil tanks would be in on the 9th; the sounding machine was ordered; the boiler was attended to; the can and the notices were in place. “The life-saving equipments that the Eastland now has gives the boat a capacity of 2,253 persons, crew included, but have ordered four 25-people capacity life rafts and shall expect you to give the boat her full capacity of 2,570 persons as soon as these rafts are installed, of which I shall notify you in due time.” The certificate of 7 June allowed 2,253. Two boats and some rafts had come off the Hart to get her that far. “They got the rafts as soon as she could,” Reid said; “they were ordered immediately.”
On 2 July the captain telephoned, and wrote. Four rafts, numbered 34 to 37, each 16 feet 8 inches by 6 feet with two cans 1 foot 10 inches across, “Manufactured by David Kahnwieler’s Sons, New York,” were aboard; “As per your letter of June 7, this will raise the Eastland’s passenger-carrying capacity to 2,570.” The amended certificate went out the same day: “boatage and raftage for seven hundred and seventy-six (776) persons, and life preservers for twenty-five hundred and seventy (2,570) persons,” and so “2,570 persons, viz, twenty-five hundred passengers and crew of seventy.” The affidavit, Reid thought, reached the office on 3 July; he inspected the rafts on the 4th. Asked for any other reason for the increase, he gave “her past performances, the people she has carried, and what she had been certificated for,” and then added the weights that reassured him: four Scotch boilers of forty-four tons each, sixty-five to seventy with water, and about 150 tons of engines and pumps, all below the main deck, “would have a tendency to make the steamer more stable.” He did not mention what had been put above it.
Nelson, who had been a local inspector himself before 1912, told the board what his own practice had been. “I always examined the equipment before I increased the permit.” Was that the safest condition? “It was, in my opinion, the safest.” He added, honestly, that for forty or fifty life preservers he would have taken an affidavit too.
Nine square feet
William J. Wood, the naval architect the coroner engaged, was asked how the number was figured. “It is figured on the basis of square feet of area of the decks.” The rule the inspection office gave to designers, he said, was not published in the regulations: “as I recollect it is about nine square feet per passenger of deck area.” Thirty thousand square feet at nine would be 3,333, which is about what Chicago gave her in 1904. On the amendment of 2 July, Wood was flat. “You can’t increase the carrying capacity of any steamboat by adding to the life-saving appliance, you have got to add to the deck space or deck area for carrying passengers.” Would the procedure make a boat more unsafe? Only if she had no surplus deck; “if she didn’t have the surplus area of deck, the carrying capacity should not be increased.” And when a juror asked whether the equipment increased her stability, Wood kept to his word. “I say her capacity.” “In other words the capacity depends upon her stability.” “Her capacity does not depend on the stability.”
That exchange is the whole system in four lines. The deck rule measured room; the equipment rule measured seats in boats; the “human freight” rule measured what she had carried before. None of the three asked what the ship would do with the weight. The board of inquiry’s first recommendation on 5 August was for a board of naval architects to pass on every steamer’s plans before she was built, and its first emergency rule was that “increases in passenger-carrying permits must be issued by inspectors only after personal inspection of the vessel, of which inspection a written record shall be made.” The committee of supervising inspectors that went round the Lakes that autumn found that “on practically every vessel visited an increase of top weights, due to additional life-saving equipment, had been made,” and asked for inclining tests on all of them at the next annual inspection, with “accurate stability calculations with full explanatory notes” furnished to the local boards, “of as simple a character as the nature of the subject will permit, because of the great number of vessels it will be necessary for the inspectors to pass upon.”
The Eastland’s final certificate hangs on the number 776. It is thirty per cent of 2,570, with five to spare. The seats it counted were in eleven lifeboats, one working boat and thirty-seven rafts, four of them new, and every one of them was on her upper decks.