Gibbs jumped at the chance to hire Admiral Taylor. “Considering Admiral Taylor’s great reputation and standing and our relative inexperience and the difficult periods through which we were passing,” he recalled later, “it was with diffidence that we suggested the possible alliance.”2 Taylor, in turn, jumped at the offer to move into commercial ship design. The retired admiral still believed that William Francis Gibbs would one day build the thousand-foot American superliner that the young man came to him with the day they met a decade earlier. For Gibbs’s part, having the Navy’s former chief constructor on board would help his firm attract contracts and recruit engineering talent in a big way.
Taylor was made a full partner in Gibbs Brothers Inc. in 1925, just as it began construction on Malolo. The keel was laid on June 1, 1925, and she was launched almost exactly a year later, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover attending. Taylor advised Gibbs Brothers on the defense-related features in the design of the vessel, including special mountings for six-inch guns, which allowed her to be converted for Navy use as a troopship or even as an aircraft carrier.
But the project produced one headache after another. Months into construction, a catchboy on one of the riveting teams dropped a molten-hot rivet, setting the scaffolding on fire and burning out most of the ship’s nearly completed interiors. What didn’t burn was waterlogged and reeked of smoke. Gibbs held the shipyard, Cramps of Philadelphia, responsible. He insisted that it pay the $200,000 (equal to about $2.5 million in 2012) needed to repair the ship.
Cramp did so, unhappily. Like Newport News, the shipyard was starved for work after World War I, and saw the $7 million Malolo job as a ticket back to profitability. The yard was wrong. As he had done when he oversaw the construction of Leviathan, Gibbs refused to allow any change orders and demanded that any deficiencies in material quality be fixed at Cramp’s expense. In the end, $4 million of unanticipated costs drove the shipyard into bankruptcy just as Malolo was completed.3
On May 26, 1927, the year of Gibbs’s marriage, his new liner arrived off Nantucket for sea trials. But the runs along the measured course were postponed. The fog was too dense for the ship to be brought up to full speed in a heavily trafficked shipping channel. Gibbs and Frederic stayed on the bridge with the ship’s captain, while Admiral Taylor went to rest in his stateroom. A light rain pattered on the decks.
Suddenly, Taylor heard the thumping of boots and frantic shouts from the bridge above. When he looked out his porthole, he saw a set of lights emerge out of the fog. A black object then revealed itself, barreling directly toward Malolo’s port side.
Admiral Taylor’s throat went dry. “They say she was a small boat,” he recalled, “but let me tell you she looked like 20,000 tons. She came up with a ‘bone in her teeth,’ and she looked as big as a snow bank.”4
A few decks up, the Gibbs brothers also saw a freighter’s prow aimed at a point right beneath the port bridge wing.
Taylor braced himself for a hit. He heard two sharp blasts from horns of the oncoming ship. The bow of the Norwegian freighter Jacob Christiansen then sank into Malolo’s flank like an axe blade. The impact knocked many on board off their feet. Down below, a switchboard operator was busy calculating his overtime pay when green seawater burst through a wall and swept him from his desk. He leveraged himself against his office door, forced it open, and managed to escape.
Gibbs heard a cacophony of sounds from below: tearing steel plates, popping rivets, ripping electrical wires, and shattering glass. Keeping cool, he walked over to the watertight door controls and flicked the alarm switch. Bells jangled up and down the length of the ship. Near the waterline, the scuppers—openings in the hull where the ship’s pumps ejected bilgewater—snapped shut.
But the icy Atlantic had already doused the boilers. With electricity gone, lights across the ship went out. Then the emergency generator kicked in, bringing the bridge’s red and green running lights back on. In the corridors and public rooms of the now-darkened ship, a few emergency lamps flickered dimly.
The Norwegian freighter had rammed Malolo directly against the bulkhead separating her two boiler rooms, ripping a vertical gash two feet wide and fifteen feet high into her hull. Taylor thought Malolo was doomed. This seasoned ship expert had never seen a ship be “rammed square amidships and still remain afloat.”5
Taylor and Gibbs knew what had happened to the liner Empress of Ireland when she was struck amidships eleven years earlier. On May 30, 1914, the midsize luxury liner—owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway—was on the first leg of a voyage between Quebec City and Liverpool. On board were nearly 1,400 passengers and crew, including a large contingent from the British Salvation Army. As she headed into the traffic-clogged St. Lawrence River, the fog closed in. At 2 A.M., as he poked his ship through the murk, Captain Henry Kendall peered off the starboard bow and saw a set of lights twinkling in the distance, lights that were moving directly toward his ship. Before Kendall could take evasive action, the Norwegian cargo ship Storstad’s bow gouged through Empress of Ireland’s side, piercing the bulkhead that separated her engine room from one of her boiler rooms. Both compartments rapidly flooded and the ship lost power, leaving passengers scrambling for the exits in total darkness. The watertight doors failed to close, and the sea poured in through open scupper valves and portholes. Within ten minutes, Empress of Ireland careened onto her side. Hundreds of people clung to the hull; hundreds more were trapped within her flooding interior. Finally, the vessel shook and slid into the icy St. Lawrence. Some 1,014 of the Empress’s passengers and crew perished.
Now, with water flooding Malolo’s boiler rooms, William Francis knew there was a possibility that his brand-new ship would flop onto her side and sink like Empress of Ireland before her.
Leaving the bridge, William Francis and Frederic scampered down several flights of stairs until their shoes hit cold seawater, soaking their trousers. They finally reached one of the watertight doors. It was wide open—they had designed a deliberate delay in the automatic closing to let crewmen escape to the upper decks.
Gibbs grabbed for one of the levers that would close the doors manually. “Just at that moment,” Frederic recalled, “the watertight door slowly began to close.” The timed delay was over and all the automatic doors between Malolo’s twelve watertight compartments automatically clanked shut. Frederic found the wait for the watertight doors to close agonizing.6
Water nevertheless filled the Malolo’s boiler rooms and other spaces. But the decks held, keeping the water from flooding the rest of the ship. Unlike Titanic, whose watertight bulkheads extended only partway up the hull, Malolo’s reached all the way to the superstructure. The bulkheads separating the two boiler rooms from the engine room and cargo holds strained under the pressure, but held firm.
Slowly, Malolo righted herself, but she was still sinking. Next to one of the breached boiler rooms, a drain cover in the indoor swimming pool had broken, allowing seawater to rapidly flood the two-deck-high space. If it flooded, the ship might lose whatever margin of stability she had left and sink. One of the Cramp workers stripped to the waist and plunged into the pool. After several lung-bursting dives, he managed to lock the drain tight.