At about ten past seven on the morning of Saturday 24 July 1915, on the south bank of the Chicago River just west of the Clark Street bridge, a deputy collector of customs named Robert McCreary stood at the head of a gangplank with two navigation inspectors beside him, each holding a counting machine. The machines were hand registers; every person who crossed the plank was a click. McCreary had asked to be told at 2,000, at 2,400 and at 2,450, and at 2,450 the three men had moved up the plank together so that the crowd on the dock could only come through one at a time. Then Inspector Luman Lobdell counted twenty-five more aloud with the ticket checker, and said there were five more, and two women came aboard with a small girl. “I was afraid that maybe she was back of this woman and Mr. Lobdell had not seen her,” McCreary told a board of inquiry five days later, “and I said, ‘Mr. Lobdell, is this little girl counted?’ and he said ‘Yes, Mr. McCreary; she is counted.’ That made the 2,500. Then I ordered the gangplank pulled in.”

A baby two weeks old, McCreary explained, “will count just as much as the Secretary.” The Secretary was William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce, who was asking the questions. The number 2,500 was the number on a paper framed under glass in the ship, dated 2 July 1915, twenty-two days earlier. It was the only measurement of the steamer Eastland that anyone in the government had ever made with an instrument, and it was exact.

The gangplank was pulled in. The ship was listing a little away from the dock. Within about twenty minutes she was lying on her side in twenty feet of water, still tied to the wharf, and more than eight hundred of the people who had been counted were dead.

Who ran it

The Eastland was inspected under section 4450 of the Revised Statutes, which gave a local board of two men, an inspector of hulls and an inspector of boilers, the power to examine a steamer once a year and fix the number of passengers she might carry. For the Eastland in 1915 that board sat at Grand Haven, Michigan: Robert Reid, hulls, born in 1856, in the service since 1906, and Charles Eckliff, boilers. Above them were ten supervising inspectors, one for each district, and above those the Supervising Inspector General, George Uhler, in Washington, under the Secretary of Commerce. The Steamboat-Inspection Service, Redfield told the coroner’s jury that week, carried “between three hundred and ten and three hundred and twenty million passengers a year” in the vessels it inspected. He had lately ordered 20,000 placards printed in large red letters, “Safety First,” and beneath, “Take No Chances.” “It would be very interesting,” he said, “if your inquiry were to find one in the pilot house or engine-room of this vessel.”

The ship belonged to the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company of St. Joseph, Michigan, which had bought her in 1914: George T. Arnold, president; William H. Hull, vice president and general manager; Walter Steele, secretary and treasurer; and in Chicago a general agent, Martin Flatow, whose work was selling tickets. Her master was Harry Pedersen, hired by the day on 26 June 1914, who had sailed freighters and yachts for twenty years and told the coroner he knew “very little about the law, gentlemen, except between wrong and right.” Her chief engineer was Joseph Erickson, who had served as an assistant on grain boats and who was, as the inquiry had it from the newspapers before it had it from him, the son-in-law of Inspector Reid.

On 24 July 1915 she was under charter. The Hawthorne Club of the Western Electric Company’s works at Cicero had sold about 7,000 tickets for its annual picnic at Michigan City, Indiana, forty miles across the lake, and the Indiana Transportation Company of Chicago, whose manager was Walter Greenebaum, had engaged five steamers to carry the crowd. Hull’s letter of 3 July fixed the terms: $500 for the trip, the Eastland “to be the first boat to leave on the trip, not later than 8:15 a.m.,” so that she could be back for her own two o’clock sailing to St. Joseph. “The carrying capacity of the Eastland,” the letter said, “is 2,570.” That was 2,500 passengers and a crew of seventy.

What they were trying to find out

Nobody called the Eastland an experiment, and her twelve years on the Lakes were not run as one. But the law that governed her rested on a hypothesis, and every summer it was tested with people. The hypothesis was that two inspectors could tell, by looking, how many passengers a ship could safely carry. The method, as Supervising Inspector Nils Nelson of Cleveland described it to Redfield’s board, was “judgment and personal observation,” and when the questioner added “and testing with human freight?” he answered, “Yes, sir.” The things the board measured were deck area, at roughly nine square feet a passenger, and life-saving equipment: a life preserver for every person, and boats and rafts for thirty per cent of them. The thing it did not measure was stability. Reid and the other inspectors, the Marine Review reported, “testified repeatedly that the law does not permit them to examine the stability of vessels.” Asked whether he could calculate the metacentric heights of the vessels in his district with his present force, Nelson said he could not: “it takes too long a time.”

Under that hypothesis sat a second one, about this ship in particular. Everyone who had sailed her, inspected her or owned her agreed that the Eastland was “tender,” or in the Lakes’ word “cranky,” and that she stood up when there was water in her double bottom and leaned when there was not. The claim, made in 1904 by the Chicago inspectors, in 1907 by the Cleveland inspector, and in 1915 by her master, her engineer and the courts, was that this made her a safe ship in competent hands. “I consider Eastland a safe vessel under all circumstances,” said Frank Dority, her master from 1903 to 1906, “if it has water in its ballast tanks and if it is properly distributed.”

Between those two claims stood a quantity nobody had ever obtained. The metacentric height of a ship, the distance between her centre of gravity and the point about which she rolls, is what decides whether she comes back upright when a crowd moves to one rail. It can be calculated from her lines, or measured by an inclining test: known weights shifted across the deck, the heel read off a pendulum. In 1628 the Swedish admiral Fleming had got a reading of this kind for the Vasa by running thirty men from side to side, and stopped the test on the third run; that story is told in “Three Planks”. The Eastland’s builder, Sidney Jenks, told a federal court in 1916 that “there never was an actual stability test for the Eastland after its launching.” The one naval architect who had been consulted on her form, George McDermott of Cornell, wrote to the Department of Commerce two days after the disaster that he had recommended, thirteen or fourteen years before, a hull “which my experience led me to believe would fulfill the speed and draft conditions, and at the same time would have a metacentric height (GM) of about 18 inches in fully laden condition.” The laden condition he had been given was 1,000 passengers.

So the experiment, as it stood on the morning of 24 July 1915, was this. A ship designed for 1,000 people on a margin of eighteen inches, never tested, had been certified by a count of her boats, rafts and life preservers to carry 2,570. The instrument that would decide whether the certificate was right was the crowd.

What they built

The Marine Review described her in July 1903, the month she entered service, in a paragraph her owners would have liked: “a high-class steamer that is expected to be among the fastest on the lakes.” The Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron had until then built ore and grain freighters. The Michigan Steamship Company of South Haven wanted a boat for the fruit trade to Chicago that could do twenty miles an hour, carry passengers in style, and get over the twelve-foot bar at the mouth of South Haven’s river. She was 265 feet on the keel, 38 feet in beam, 1,961 gross tons, with two triple-expansion engines, four Scotch boilers at 200 pounds, three steel decks, a hundred staterooms and a dining room the full width of the ship. She had a double bottom, divided into tanks, and that was where her stability was kept.

The tanks were five a side, filled from the river or the lake through a single ten-inch sea valve on the port side, low on the bilge in the engine room, by way of a manifold from which a pipe ran to each tank, and emptied by a duplex pump that discharged forward on the starboard side. William Nack, her chief engineer in 1904, told Redfield’s board how she was handled: “by filling a certain tank, which was No. 3 tank, right under the boilers, that would be sufficient water to ballast that boat up with any amount of people on her.” No. 3 held about 250 tons and took twenty-five or thirty minutes to fill; No. 4 was used for trimming. A half-filled tank, he said, “would be as bad as if you didn’t have any water,” because the water would run to the low side and hold her there. The tanks were filled every morning before a passenger came aboard. The companion piece “Two hundred and fifty tons” follows the water through the system.

That was the practice of a man who had learned the ship. The ship herself taught the lesson once, on Sunday 17 July 1904, when she lay at South Haven with her water bottoms partly pumped out to get alongside the shallow dock, and the rest of the water in them drawn off for cooking and washing, and sailed for Chicago on a hot evening with the inspector of hulls from Chicago, Ira Mansfield, aboard. The passengers crowded the hurricane deck for the breeze; Mansfield counted the tickets afterwards and made it 2,142 adults, with, by his eye, 1,200 of them on the roof against an order allowing 600. “She listed first to port slightly, and later on she listed to starboard,” he testified eleven years later. “I think she went to about a twenty angle, and in fact I was a little bit scared or afraid myself.” The Marine Review reported the next week that the crowd would not move “until the fire hose was turned on them.” The ship was righted by putting water in her bottoms. Mansfield and his colleague Roy Peck wrote to the owners on 18 July: the cause was “that the water ballast was not properly confined,” and “if no more persons are carried on her upper deck than our measurements permit her to carry, viz, 500 people, … it would be impossible to list the boat in the way that she was listed Sunday night.” The inspectors cancelled her permit for 3,300 and issued one for 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.”

Then the certificates went on. Mansfield’s board gave her 2,800 in 1904 and 3,000 in 1905 and 1906. Sold to Cleveland owners for the run to Cedar Point, she was given 2,200 by Nelson in 1907, then 2,400 after he had watched her at the dock and on the lake, then 2,200, then 2,000 by 1912. He had cautioned her two chief engineers to use the tanks, “and they all agreed with me and promised me to use the tanks.” He had never told the owners she was unsafe without them. When Cleveland newspapers took the ship up, her owners answered with an advertisement in the Cleveland Leader of 9 August 1910 offering $5,000 to anyone who could show that she was not a safe boat. “That is open to all the scientific men,” Nelson said, “and no one took it up that I know of.” On 6 June 1913 she went aground on the mud near the East Ninth Street pier in Cleveland with her passengers aboard until two in the morning. That year a naval architect, John Devereux York, rode on her and afterwards wrote to the harbour master that unless her defects were remedied there would be a “serious accident”; the Day Book listed his letter on 26 July 1915 among the papers the inquest would hear. The ship had been altered, too. William J. Wood, a Chicago naval architect, had inspected her for her first owner in 1903 and recommended changes that cost $35,000, all made except one: a hollow water line aft, which would have meant rebuilding the hull. Forty-nine of her staterooms came off in the winter of 1904 and 1905 and the other thirty-nine at Cleveland; the deck house was cut down abaft the second funnel and the funnels shortened. “The later picture,” the Marine Review wrote beside its two photographs, “shows that the deck house, which originally extended almost to the stern, was cut down.”

Bought back to Lake Michigan by the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, she carried 2,045 in 1914. That winter, laid up in a canal on the Michigan shore, her sea valve froze and cracked, water ran into the open tanks on the port side, and she settled on the bottom with a list; a diver patched the hull and a new valve of the same size went in. Wood, who had met Pedersen on other business, offered Hull his services for the overhaul and was told “he had no need for my services.” He went aboard anyway and found carpenters laying new decking over the steel. “I suppose you will take care of whatever superstructure you put up there,” he said; “you won’t put on any additional weight?” Hull “gave me to understand ‘We got men up here who understand their business.’” The next time Wood saw the Eastland she was on her side in the Chicago River.

Twenty-five hundred

The inspection law and the owners’ wishes met in a correspondence that Redfield’s board read into its record, letter by letter, in Reid’s presence; the companion piece “Seven hundred and seventy-six” gives the whole paper trail from 1903. It begins on 8 May 1915, before the season, with Reid and Eckliff writing to Pedersen “as per agreement with you.” They had looked over the Eastland’s life rafts and estimated that they would carry 405 persons; her lifeboats would carry 159; together 564, which at the thirty per cent rule gave her “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.” For 2,570 she needed boats and rafts for 771. That meant two more boats and rafts for another 173, and the letter told the captain how to measure a raft: four square feet of deck and eight cubic feet of air per person. It added a warning: “We would call your attention to the seventh page of the seamen’s act, which will be in force for this steamer the season of 1916.”

The Seamen’s Act was the law Congress had passed in March 1915, three years after the Titanic. For passenger steamers on the Great Lakes, from 4 November 1915, it said that “at no moment of its voyage” might a vessel more than three miles from shore have aboard more persons “than that for whom accommodation is provided in the lifeboats and pontoon life rafts on board,” with, in summer, half of them in boats and rafts. The Eastland’s owners were not buying rafts for the new law; they were buying them for the old rule, so that she could carry 2,500 in 1915. But the principle was the same in both, and it was the principle of the whole system: a passenger is safe if there is a seat for him in a boat.

On 30 May the inspectors went over the ship at Benton Harbor. They wrote on 4 June ordering storm-oil tanks, a deep-sea sounding machine, three stay bolts hammered up in the after starboard boiler and “a metal can large enough for the engineer to store his greasy rags in.” On 7 June Pedersen replied by affidavit, sworn before a notary. Everything was done or ordered. “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.” Two boats and some rafts had come off the company’s other steamer, the Eugene C. Hart. The certificate of 7 June allowed 2,253.

On 2 July Pedersen telephoned Grand Haven and wrote the same day: “As per my phone to-day, we placed the following rafts on the steamship Eastland,” with the numbers of four rafts, each 16 feet 8 inches by 6 feet, two cans apiece, made by David Kahnweiler’s Sons of New York. “As per your letter of June 7, this will raise the Eastland’s passenger-carrying capacity to 2,570.” The same day the local board issued an amendment to the certificate of inspection: “This steamer being equipped with boatage and raftage for seven hundred and seventy-six (776) persons, and life preservers for twenty-five hundred and seventy (2,570) persons, may carry from May 15 to October 15, both dates inclusive, 2,570 persons, viz, twenty-five hundred passengers and crew of seventy.”

Nobody had looked at the rafts. “Did you examine the boat to find out whether or not that equipment was on before you granted the increase?” Albert Thurman, the department’s solicitor, asked Reid. “We did not.” “Did you grant the increase before the life-saving equipment was on?” “No, sir; it was put on, according to his affidavit there. We granted the additional equipment by that affidavit.” Reid saw the rafts on 4 July, two days after the certificate, and found them there. By then the ship carried eleven lifeboats, one working boat and thirty-seven rafts, which the inspectors reckoned at thirty per cent of 2,570, or 771, and she carried 2,570 life preservers. Congressman Adolph Sabath, who was cross-examining, asked whether anything else had been added to the boat to justify 2,500. “That is all they are required to have for carrying 2,500,” Reid said; “they had the life preservers aboard.” Had he spoken to the captain about the limit? “No, sir.” “Did you talk to your son-in-law, the engineer, about it?” “No, sir.” Thurman asked whether there had been any other reason for the increase. “Taking into consideration her past performances, the people she has carried, and what she had been certificated for.”

Wood, asked at the inquest about the same paper, gave the naval architect’s answer in one sentence: “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.” And a juror asked the question that the law had never asked. “It would not increase her stability?” “I say her capacity.” “In other words the capacity depends upon her stability.” “Her capacity does not depend on the stability.”

The night before the picnic Lobdell slept aboard the Eastland, in a crew bunk, because he lived far out and had to be at the gangway early. The ship had carried 1,100 on a moonlight excursion that evening.

What it looked like from inside

The ship had come to the Clark Street wharf at four in the morning, and at half past six, by the Collector’s account, she began to load. At about the same hour, in the engine room, the second assistant engineer, Fred Snow, who had been on the boat two days, had the oiler Peter Erickson, nineteen, open the pump valves on tanks 2 and 3 on both sides, and they were emptied. “We always did that every morning while in the harbor of Chicago,” the oiler told the coroner, “and usually on the other side, too.” The chief engineer had told Snow to work with 2 and 3, “as they responded most quickly.” There was no gauge on the tanks; the customary way to know what was in them, Snow said, was to pump them all empty.

The crowd came up the plank at fifty a minute, by Lobdell’s reckoning. At about a quarter past seven, with something like 1,700 aboard, the ship heeled toward the dock so far that the plank rose and “the people could not get on the boat,” and they were held back until she righted. The engine room’s usual answer to a list toward the dock, the oiler said, was water in the port tanks, the ones on the river side, and the harbour master thought that was what they were doing. Then she went the other way. The harbour master, Adam Weckler, reached the bridge at ten past seven and saw her “listed to port, just coming over, about a 5 to 6 degree list.” He called up to Pedersen to put in his water ballast and trim her up. “He said he was trimming all the time.” Weckler told him, “I won’t give you the bridge until you right her.” The dockman ran forward to cast off; Weckler would not let him. The mate, Adelbert Fisher, who had been with her six weeks, stood forward by the lines in the first drops of rain and went into the pilot house for his oilskins; when he came out she had listed “a little bit more than usual.” The first list, he thought, “is generally usual, either one way or the other on most any steamboat that I was ever on.”

Below, Snow and the chief engineer watched the tell-tale. About seventeen minutes before the end, by Peter Erickson’s reckoning, the chief sent Snow to the sea valve and had the oiler open the manifold valves to Nos. 2 and 3 on the starboard side, the dock side, to pull her back. “It listed a little more and finally went quite a little. Then the list stopped. The engineer said: ‘Well, I guess we’ve got her.’” Snow remembered the words as “I think you’ve caught her now, all right,” and added: “but we hadn’t.” Water for the starboard tanks had to come in through the one sea valve on the port side, which was going deeper as she heeled, and up through the manifold; the engine room could not fill one side and empty the other at once. Erickson, who was advised at the inquest not to testify and did not, was reported in the Marine Review as saying: “We were listing for 17 minutes before we started. I was flooding the right side of the boat. I had five water ballast tanks on each side of the boat. I was working only through two tanks on each side. I thought two were enough.”

On the roof, the hurricane deck, Weckler judged there were seven hundred to a thousand people, “mostly all standing up.” It had begun to rain and the band was playing. The stern line was cast off; the tug Kenosha had a line on the bow and was told to keep it slack. At about twenty-five past seven Fisher saw her heel further than before, then straighten “a matter of a foot or so,” and thought she would come back as she always had. He stumbled over a raincoat on the deck. When he looked up the captain was shouting to the harbour master, and Weckler was running aft, and “that was the time … she took the final plunge over.” Water came in through the open gangway doors on the port side and the ports along the crew’s quarters, which stood about two feet above the river. The breast line, the one rope still holding her to starboard, pulled its piling out of the wharf. “When the piles came out,” Weckler said, “she went right over.” Snow crawled out through a hole in the side onto the steel plating, “where the boat was listing so that my feet slipped from under me.” Fisher took a girl who had hold of his arm, pulled her over the rail and slid down the hull by the anchor. Lobdell went into the water with his counter in his pocket; by the time he looked at it he had turned it back to zero, as he always did once a boat was loaded. From the first list to the last, the harbour master said, the people aboard had no time to save themselves. “None at all.”

What happened

Those on the upper deck were mostly thrown clear or climbed onto the hull as it came up like a floor beneath them. Those below, in the cabins, the dining room and the bar, where the Day Book estimated five hundred had been, were under water in seconds. Tugs and men from the wharves pulled people out; men with torches cut holes in the plating to reach the ones trapped inside. The dead were carried to an armoury and laid in rows, and through that night and the next day the lines of people looking for their families moved past them. The Chicago Tribune of 26 July was still writing of “the loss of over 1,200.” The Red Cross’s national director, who arrived from Washington, wrote “over nine hundred.” The federal indictment in September said 812. The count that stood by September, and that the trade press printed, was 844, among them twenty-two whole families. The court that closed the civil case twenty years later used 835. The number aboard was 2,500 passengers and seventy crew by the certificate; the Marine Review said 2,572; Western Electric men who had watched the loading guessed 3,200 and 3,700.

The inquests began the same day; the companion piece “Grand Rapids” follows all of them to the end. The Cook County coroner, Peter Hoffman, sat with a jury of six on 24 July and heard witnesses through the 29th, with the state’s attorney, Maclay Hoyne, beside him. Its verdict, dated 28 July, held Hull, Pedersen, Erickson, Greenebaum, Reid and Eckliff to the grand jury “on the charge of manslaughter and for such other offenses as the facts may warrant,” and said why. “In the absence of evidence of undue acts on the part of the passengers or violent physical causes such as explosions, fire or collisions, the fact that this vessel overturned is proof either that it was improperly constructed for the service employed, or that it was improperly loaded, operated or maintained, or that several or all of these causes operated to bring about the serious result.” Then it turned on the law. “There is not now, nor has there ever been an inspection service maintained by the Federal Government for the purpose of determining the stability of boats offered for passenger service. It is the judgment of this jury that the present method of determining the passenger-carrying capacity of vessels is not founded on any proper basis.”

Redfield reached Chicago on the morning of 27 July with his solicitor and put the statutory inquiry, which by law belonged to a local board, into the hands of the Milwaukee inspectors, who had never inspected the ship, with himself, Uhler, two Chicago businessmen, the lieutenant governor of Illinois and later a naval constructor and a Lighthouse Service engineer sitting as an advisory board. He summoned Reid and Eckliff from Grand Haven. They were arrested by the Chicago police on arrival and, on one day when they were called as witnesses, “brought in irons into our public hearing,” as he complained to the President. The hearings ran from 29 July until the federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, ordered that no witness subpoenaed before his grand jury be examined elsewhere, which took the captain, the engineer and the owners out of Redfield’s reach. The board adjourned on 5 August without a finding on blame and with a list of recommendations instead: a board of naval architects in the Department of Commerce to pass on the plans of every merchant steamer over a hundred tons, a right of appeal from the local boards, written approval by a supervising inspector of every increase in passengers, and, at once, by regulation, that increases be granted only after inspection, and that owners of any vessel whose stability was in doubt be required to make “inclining tests.” The naval constructor, James Ackerson, inclined the excursion steamer Christopher Columbus at Chicago that week.

The state grand jury indicted on 10 August: Arnold, Hull, Steele and Ray Davis of the company for manslaughter, Pedersen and Erickson for criminal carelessness. The federal grand jury indicted on 22 September, “charging conspiracy and criminal carelessness in the operation of an unseaworthy boat”: the same men with Greenebaum, Reid and Eckliff and the two companies. Six of them lived in Michigan, and the government had to ask a Michigan court to send them to Chicago for trial. The removal hearing opened at Grand Rapids on 20 January 1916 before Judge Clarence Sessions, with Clarence Darrow for the defence. Jenks, the builder, had refused to appear for either side and was called by the court. He had designed the ship, he said, “to make twenty miles an hour and capable of carrying 500 passengers”; he had no way of knowing what she did after she left his yard; he had not worried about her. There had never been a stability test. “The boat slid into the water on its side at the launching, and when it dropped into the water it tilted in the opposite direction to an angle of forty-five degrees, then righted itself as straight as a church, satisfactorily demonstrating its stability.” On 18 February 1916 Sessions refused the warrant of removal and, in the Associated Press’s words, “emphatically stated that the government failed to make out a case against the six defendants.” No one was ever convicted.

The civil case took longer. On 27 July 1915, three days after the disaster, the owners signed a contract with the Great Lakes Towing Company to raise the ship, “no cure no pay,” for $34,500, and on 17 August, the day after she was righted, they petitioned the federal court in Chicago under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, which confines an owner’s liability for a loss incurred without his “privity or knowledge” to the value of the vessel. A trustee sold the hull at auction on 15 December 1915 for $46,000, and the towing company’s claim came first. In 1919 Judge George Carpenter refused the rescuers who had asked for a share of the salvage money: “Their reward they have; it never can be taken from them, and it is measured by a standard greater than money.” The claims of the dead waited. In 1933 a special commissioner reported, and the district court decreed, that the Eastland “tipped over while at the dock on July 24th, 1915, and caused an appalling loss of life through the negligence of the engineer in charge of the operation of her water ballast tanks,” that she “was seaworthy in every respect, properly equipped and manned and fit for the carriage of passengers if properly handled,” and that the negligence was not within the owner’s privity or knowledge. The Seventh Circuit affirmed on 7 August 1935. Of the fund, the court noted, “This fund is now exhausted.”

After

The Navy bought the hull in November 1917, renamed her Wilmette, and commissioned her as a gunboat on 20 September 1918, too late for the war. She spent twenty-five years as a training ship for naval reservists on the Lakes, sank the surrendered German submarine UC-97 by gunfire on Lake Michigan in 1921, trained armed-guard gun crews for merchant ships in 1942, was decommissioned on 28 November 1945 and sold for scrap on 31 October 1946.

Redfield’s committee of supervising inspectors, sent round the Lakes that autumn, reported in December 1915 that “on practically every vessel visited an increase of top weights, due to additional life-saving equipment, had been made,” and recommended that all passenger vessels be subjected to inclining tests under naval architects, and that “no passenger vessel should depend upon liquid ballast to insure the vessel’s stability.” The Marine Review, which spoke for the shipowners, drew the opposite moral about the Seamen’s Act: “On Eastland lifeboats and liferafts were worse than useless. As the ship careened the lifeboats slid from their places and swept many persons into the river.” Eighty years later the historian George Hilton gave his book on the ship the subtitle “Legacy of the Titanic,” for the weight the law had put on her upper deck. The record above shows at least that the rafts were the reason for the number, whatever they did to the ship.

The wharf is still there, between Clark and LaSalle Streets. A historical society founded in Chicago by descendants of those aboard keeps the count at 844.

What it taught

The count was exact and it measured the wrong thing. Three men with registers, a child checked twice, the plank pulled in at 2,500 and not one over: the record of that count is the most carefully verified fact in the whole inquiry, and the inquiry spent days on it. It was the only measurement the law knew how to make. The quantity that decided the morning, the height of the metacentre above the centre of gravity with 2,570 people aboard and the tanks empty, had never been measured by anyone, and the law gave nobody the power to ask for it. The Vasa’s people at least ran thirty men across the deck. The Eastland’s test was 2,500 people walking aboard at fifty a minute, and her list at 1,700 was the reading. It was read as the usual thing.

Equipment for the passengers was taken for safety of the ship. The arithmetic of the certificate is the arithmetic of the Seamen’s Act and of every lifeboat law since the Titanic: so many seats in boats, so many persons allowed. It is a true rule about what happens after a ship fails and says nothing about whether she will. In the Eastland’s case it ran backwards. Four rafts made a hundred seats, a hundred seats made 2,500 passengers, and the rafts, the two boats from the Hart and the preservers for 2,570 all went on the upper decks of a ship whose designer had been told to allow for 1,000. Nobody on either side of the correspondence of May and June 1915 wrote a sentence about weight.

A ship that lists has given a reading, and each time it was converted into a story about handling. In 1904 the cause was that the water “was not properly confined”; in 1907 the engineers “promised me to use the tanks”; in 1910 the answer to the newspapers was a reward; in 1913 an architect’s letter went to a harbour master; in the winter of 1914 she lay down in a canal because a valve froze; on 24 July 1915 the harbour master shouted to the captain to trim her and the captain was trimming. The instrument gave the same reading for eleven years, and every reader concluded that the man at the valve should have been quicker; the courts said so in law. They were not wrong about the engineer. The finding leaves the design where it was.

A safeguard that depends on a man at a valve is a design decision, and it was never written down. Nack’s No. 3 tank, full to the top so that nothing could slosh, filled every morning before a passenger came aboard, was the Eastland’s real certificate of stability, and it existed in the head of a chief engineer who left her in 1906. There was no plate in the engine room, no line on the inspection certificate, no gauge on the tanks. A new chief in 1914, a second assistant two days aboard, a nineteen-year-old at the manifold, and the ship’s morning routine was to pump her empty in the harbour. Ackerson explained to the board, in a page any engineer could follow, why a half-filled tank makes a tender ship worse, and nobody aboard had been told it in those words. Everyone had been told she was cranky.

The law could see men, so it found a man. Section 4450 directed the inquiry after an accident to “incompetency or misconduct” of licensed officers, and the lieutenant governor said as much to Reid: it was not the act of God, so it was one or the other. Reid had fixed 2,500 on a sworn letter; Erickson had emptied the tanks; both were within the statute’s range, and the design, the alterations, the rafts and the hypothesis that a count of equipment was a measure of safety were outside it. Redfield, to his credit, wrote the missing instrument into his recommendations within a fortnight: plans approved by naval architects, inclining tests on demand. The coroner’s jury had said it in one line first.

Check the story before you learn from it. The time she went over is 7:28 in the modern accounts, “shortly after 7:30” in the trade press, 7:35 in the Collector’s letter and 7:45 in the first edition. The people aboard are 2,570 by the certificate, 2,572 in the Marine Review, 3,200 and 3,700 by the men who watched them board. The dead are 812, 835, 844, “over nine hundred,” “nearly 1,000” and 1,200, depending on the day and the office. The reward was $500 in the question, $1,000 in the witness’s memory and $5,000 in the advertisement. Mansfield counted 2,142 tickets in 1904 in one letter and 2,270 at the hearing. The 2,500th person was a little girl to McCreary and a baby in arms to the Marine Review; the ticket-taker remembered “room for eight more.” What is not in dispute is the correspondence: a letter of 8 May saying what equipment 2,500 would need, an affidavit of 7 June, a telephone call and a letter of 2 July naming four rafts, a certificate the same day, and a ship that had never been inclined loading at fifty a minute on a Saturday morning. That is enough to learn from, and all of it was on paper before the first ticket was taken.

Sources

• United States Department of Commerce, Investigation of Accident to the Steamer “Eastland,” Chicago, Ill., July 24 to August 5, 1915: Copy of Testimony and Report of Board of Inquiry Made to the Secretary of Commerce, with Letters from the Secretary of Commerce to the President and to the Speaker … also Copy of Preliminary Report of the Committee of Supervising Inspectors, printed for the House Committee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, 1916. Redfield’s letter to the President of 10 August 1915; the testimony of McCreary, Lobdell, Westcott, Peck, Nelson, Reid, Judson, Dority, Nack, Mansfield, Ackerson and Gillette; the letters of 18, 22 and 30 July and 2 August 1904, of 8 May, 4 and 7 June and 2 July 1915; the amended certificate of 2 July 1915; McDermott’s letter of 26 July 1915; the Collector’s letter of 24 July; the board’s statement of 5 August; the supervising inspectors’ report of 3 December 1915. archive.org
• Cook County Coroner, Transcript of Testimony before the Coroner’s Jury, July 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, on the Body of Kate Austin and All Others Lost by the Overturning of the Excursion Steamer Eastland, Chicago, 1915. The witness list, Greenebaum and Hull’s letters of 3 and 16 July, Weckler, Wood’s testimony and reports, Pedersen’s and Erickson’s refusals, Olander, Snow, Peter Erickson, Fisher, Redfield’s statement to the jury, and the verdict of 28 July 1915. archive.org, second scan with the verdict
• The Eastland (In re St. Joseph-Chicago S.S. Co.; Bishop v. St. Joseph-Chicago S.S. Co.), 78 F.2d 984, Seventh Circuit, 7 August 1935. The commissioner’s findings, the capacities assigned from 1903, the “appalling loss of life,” 835 dead, the exhausted fund. case.law, courtlistener.com
• In re St. Joseph-Chicago S.S. Co., The Eastland, 262 F. 535, Northern District of Illinois, 23 December 1919 (Carpenter, J.). The towing contract of 27 July 1915, the raising of 4 to 16 August, the petition of 17 August, the sale for $46,000 on 15 December 1915, and the life salvors’ claim. case.law
• Brief for Appellee, In re Petition of St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, No. 5257, Seventh Circuit, October Term 1934. The procedural history of the limitation case. archive.org
• H. Cole Estep, “Eastland Brings Tragedy to Lakes,” and the editorial “Eastland Disaster a Severe Lesson,” The Marine Review, Cleveland, September 1915. The 2,572, Pedersen’s interview, the 1903 description, the alterations, the ownership at Cleveland, the grounding of 6 June 1913, Mansfield’s and Nelson’s testimony, Snow’s and Peter Erickson’s, Erickson’s reported statement, the verdict, the indictments of 10 August and the remarks on lifeboats; Figures 1 and 2. archive.org
• “Twin Screw Steamer Eastland,” Marine Review and Marine Record, 16 July 1903, with the photograph used above; and the note on the listing “on her return trip from South Haven to Chicago on Sunday night last,” Marine Review, 21 July 1904. 1903, 1904
• International Marine Engineering, August and September 1915, editorial notes on the disaster, the 844 dead and the state indictments. September 1915
• The Seamen’s Act, Public Law 63-302, 38 Stat. 1164, approved 4 March 1915, section 14, “Vessels on Great Lakes.” govinfo.gov
• The Day Book, Chicago, 24 July 1915 (noon edition), “Hundreds drowned as boat turns over in Chicago River,” and 26 July 1915, page 2, the list of evidence for the inquest including the letter of John Devereux York. 24 July, 26 July
• Chicago Tribune, 26 July 1915, page 3, on the morgue and the first estimates of the dead; and 27 July 1915, the diagram and caption on J. Devereux York and the keel, which is quoted at second hand from Chicagology’s transcription because Michigan State University’s scan of that day lacks the page. 26 July (MSU), Chicagology
• Associated Press dispatches: The Topeka State Journal, 22 September 1915, the federal indictments and the figure of 812; Evening Star, Washington, 23 January 1916, “Eastland planned for 500 capacity,” Jenks’s testimony at Grand Rapids; Norwich Bulletin, 19 February 1916, Judge Sessions’s ruling. Topeka, Star, Norwich
• Ernest P. Bicknell, “The Eastland Disaster,” The American Red Cross Magazine, September 1915. The loading from six o’clock, the ballast tanks, “over nine hundred.” archive.org
• Searle Hendee, “Overloaded and Topheavy, the ‘Eastland’ Founders at Its Dock,” Popular Mechanics, October 1915, and “Raising of the Ill-Fated ‘Eastland,’” September 1915. October, September
• Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, “Wilmette.” The purchase, commissioning, UC-97, the 1942 training duty, decommissioning and sale. history.navy.mil
• Eastland Disaster Historical Society, “What happened.” The 844 and the twenty-two families. eastlanddisaster.org
• George W. Hilton, Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, Stanford University Press, 1995. In copyright; not consulted.
• Figures: the 1903 photograph from Marine Review and Marine Record, 16 July 1903, page 26; the ship at Chicago and the wreck from The Marine Review, September 1915, page 320, Figures 1 and 2; all publications before 1930, cropped from the University of Michigan and New York Public Library scans on archive.org.