“What’s the surface like below the hulk?”

“It felt like soft mud,” Hall noted.

“Then we can get straps under the hull,” the captain said.

“Yes, sir,” Hall said.

“Then we’ll come alongside to pick you up,” the captain said, as he walked back toward the pilothouse.

“Good,” Hall muttered under his breath.

His inspection of General Slocum had made him uneasy. Ghosts of a thousand souls seemed to inhabit the inner sanctum he had entered. Twice he had thought he felt arms grab for him. Once he had caught sight of what he thought was an apparition out of the comer of his faceplate. When he turned his head and glanced through the murky water, he’d realized that it was part of a canvas top covering flapping in the current. Still, Hall had been spooked. He finished his inspection in record time.

Three weeks later, General Slocum was above water once again. The burned hulk was towed to a shipyard in New Jersey, where the top decks were razed and the wreckage in the hull removed and scrapped. Over the next few weeks, the hull was converted into a barge and rechristened Maryland.

She, too, would meet with an inglorious end.

The coast off the eastern seaboard of the United States can be a dangerous place when the winds of winter whip the surface of the sea. Captain Tebo Mallick of the towboat Gestimaine was a salty dog. Thirty-seven of his fifty years on the planet had been spent at sea, and he’d learned to read the signs on the water like they were lit with spotlights. Tonight, the sea off Atlantic City, New Jersey, was no place for man nor ship. Towering waves were rolling from east to west, the tops frosted with foamy white. Sheets of cold rain rattled the pilothouse windows like sand shot from a cannon. He stared toward land.

“I can barely see the lighthouse,” he said to a cat that lay atop the chart desk.

Then he swiveled and tried to look astern. Somewhere in the fog, a hundred yards to the rear and attached to his ship by a thick hemp line, was a barge loaded with furnace coke named Maryland. At just that second, a wave broke over his bow as the door to the pilothouse opened. The light from the brass fuel oil lamp hanging from the ceiling flickered and almost went out.

“I think the barge is taking on water,” deckhand Frank Terbill shouted.

Mallick twisted the wheel of Francis Ann as the weight from the barge pulled his stern toward the waves.

“She’s been porpoising for the last half hour,” Mallick said. “I was hoping the seas would calm some.”

Mallick felt his engine surge as the line connecting Maryland to his stern slackened.

“She’s going to whipsaw,” Mallick managed to shout to Terbill, before a wave hit Francis Ann broadside and threw them both against the bulkhead.

Then one of the lines connecting them to Maryland parted. It whipped over the pilothouse like an angry snake and snapped against the windshield. Francis Ann was pulled to port as the weight shifted and Mallick struggled to keep her from facing abeam to the mounting waves. Grabbing an ax mounted on the wall, he handed it to Terbill.

“Cut that bitch loose,” he shouted, “or we’re going in.”

Terbill raced to the stem deck and raised the ax over his head. Then he swung with all the force he possessed. The blade parted the line and embedded itself in the gunwale. In the fog, no one witnessed Maryland go under.

In 1987, Bob Fleming, my old friend and researcher, sent me a report from the Army Corps of Engineers on the sinking and later demolition of a barge called the Maryland. At first I failed to see the significance of a lost barge, but then he called me on the phone and explained that Maryland was the ill-fated excursion steamboat General Slocum that had burned in New York’s East River in the summer of 1904 with horrible loss of life.

Sometime after the burned-out hulk had grounded on Brother’s Island in the East River, she was raised and towed to a shipyard. With her hull still sound below the waterline, General Slocum was sold for $70,000 by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company for use as a coal barge and renamed Maryland.

Six years later, while hauling a cargo of furnace coke and being pulled by the tug Asher J. Hudson from Camden to Newark, New Jersey, her hull began to leak. With a gale blowing and seas rising, the tug captain, Robert Moon, knew Maryland could not stay afloat. He removed his crew from the barge and cut her loose.

For the final time, General Slocum/Maryland slipped into the sea.

Upon hearing of her sinking, Maryland’s owner, Peter Hagen, celebrated. Not only would marine insurance cover the loss, but he was glad she was off his hands. In his mind, the vessel was cursed. She was always tied up for repairs, and before she made her last trip he was forced to add to her expense by replacing her rudder.

“Ill fortune always followed the Slocum,” said Hagen. “She was always getting into trouble. I’m glad she’s gone.”

The 1912 annual report of the Chief of Engineers of the Army Corps stated:

Another Corps report stated that the wreck was standing fifteen feet off the bottom in a water depth of twenty-four feet — thus the concern over her endangering other passing ships.

Finding General Slocum, a.k.a. Maryland, sounded like a piece of cake, right? The initial thinking was that the wreck would lie exposed on the bottom and that a sidescan sonar would have a relatively easy time locating it. Thus, all we had to do was merely sail a mile off Corson’s Inlet, cruise around for twenty minutes, and shout “Eureka!” Right?

Ho, ho, ho.

In September of 1994, Ralph Wilbanks and Wes Hall had finished a survey job in New York, so I asked them to try for General Slocum on their way home to the Carolinas. They launched Ralph’s survey boat Diversity and spent two days mowing the lawn outside Corson’s Inlet with a sidescan sonar.

A thorough search of the seafloor turned up nothing. The sonar read only a flat sandy bottom.

Now it was time to get back to the archival research. Different pieces of information began filtering in. One mention of the wreck put it two miles off the Ludlum Beach Lifeguard Station. Divers up and down the Jersey coast claimed to have dived on Maryland, but they all described intact remains that looked to them like a barge.

Two different targets were provided by Gene Patterson of Atlantic Divers at Egg Harbor Township. One turned out to be an old steamship, and another was probably the anchor and chain of the wreck, since the anomaly was spread out in the same vicinity. Gene also offered another target, but it was more than five miles off Corson’s Inlet.