Finally, the Malolo stopped sinking. She sat upright, weighed down with six thousand tons of seawater and drawing thirty-six feet. But for now, she was safe.
No evacuation was necessary, but Malolo’s captain sent out a distress call, asking for a tow. Tankers Gulfland and City of Pretoria raced to the scene, their captains eager for salvage money. With her whistles silent, Malolo’s captain guided approaching rescue ships through the fog by ringing the liner’s brass bell. When the two tankers arrived, they each launched a lifeboat full of their strongest sailors. “Both crews,” the New York Times reported, “pulled with as much vim as a Harvard crew.” When one of the rescue ships tried to tow the liner through now-choppy seas, the line grew taught and snapped. Finally, three powerful tugs came alongside and began to pull the injured Malolo toward New York.7
On the morning of May 29, 1927, Malolo dropped anchor off Staten Island. She was so low in the water that she looked more like a barge than a luxury liner. Curious bystanders lined the Battery as tugs towed her to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she would be pumped dry and patched. At the yard, photographers took pictures of the design team on the bridge. The Gibbs brothers stand next to each other, their hats off. William Francis, in a dark wool coat with his thinning hair blown by the wind, is looking away from the camera, an irritated expression on his face.8
But even the bankrupted Cramp Shipyard praised the ship’s designer. When asked by reporters if he was satisfied with the ship’s design, J. Harry Mull, president of Cramp, responded, “Satisfied? I doubt if the hole in the Lusitania was as large as this one we have. We are here in New York harbor. That speaks for itself.”
The only injury was a crew member’s sprained ankle.
For William Francis Gibbs, the publicity generated by the Malolo’s near sinking would link his name with an obsession with safety at sea. For him there was no worse sin than cutting corners to save the client money, especially at the expense of passenger safety. It was the duty of a ship designer not just to meet regulations, but to exceed them, no matter how much the client or shipyard complained about the cost of extra compartments, automatic scupper closers, and lifesaving gear. In July 1927, he published his first piece in a trade journaclass="underline" “Collision Vindicates Safety Measures,” in Marine Engineering and Shipping News. Gibbs proudly pointed out that his design team had followed not merely U.S. requirements, but the standards set in 1914 at the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which America had refused to ratify even after Senator Smith’s findings on the Titanic disaster. Spending money in the short term to create the safest ship possible was “good business, aside from ethics and morality, to make such an investment.”9 Rectifying the flaws in Titanic’s design, in fact, had been Gibbs’s mantra throughout the entire design process. Small wonder Malolo survived a collision with a freighter that would have sunk the bigger ship.
It took another disaster, however, for the world to finally act on those promises made back after Titanic’s sinking. In 1928, the British passenger ship Vestris capsized in a storm off the Virgina coast, killing 127 people. Shifting cargo caused her to list, and then seawater poured in through an open coal port that could not be closed. After the tragedy, seafaring nations convened in London to strengthen the international Safety of Life at Sea regulations, first set down in 1914 in response to the Titanic disaster. The SOLAS convention ratified the rules on stability and compartmentalization that had been raised at the 1914 meeting but ignored after World War I broke out. However, it was not until 1933 that the safety standards William Francis Gibbs worked into Malolo became international law.
Malolo proved to be a popular and successful transpacific liner. But as fine and safe a ship as Malolo was, she was comparatively small and no international record breaker. By the late 1920s, the public was much more interested in a new generation of transatlantic giants emerging from the drawing boards of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. With its ships clearly obsolete and the United States Lines about to be sold into private hands, it seemed clear that as long as the 1920s economic boom continued, America would build a new superliner.
The question was, who would design her?
Gibbs knew he had some stiff competition from another naval architect, a favorite of shipyards and lines alike for turning out attractive ships for the American coastal trade on time and on budget. Theodore E. Ferris did not make many headlines during the 1920s, but he had a steadier and more lucrative practice than Gibbs. And he had made fewer enemies.
Gibbs decided that the best course of action was to find sympathetic partners and attempt to buy the ships of the United States Lines outright. Once the company was secured, he would find financing to build his own transatlantic superliner.
11. A GERMAN SEA MONSTER
The 1920s was a boom time for the transatlantic business. The big ships had nicknames: Berengaria was the “Berry,” Majestic the “Magic Stick,” Olympic the “Old Reliable.” During the high summer season, men in straw boaters and women in cloche hats crammed the pier heads, waving handkerchiefs as the giants backed away from their piers into the Hudson, blasting their whistles and belching black smoke from their stacks.
The five- or six-day trip was filled with masquerades, passenger talent shows, shuffleboard tournaments, and smoking room bridge games. After dark, the booze flowed and hot jazz bands blared from the ballroom stage. The Prince of Wales and Queen Marie of Romania joined Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Vincent Astor at captain’s tables overflowing with grilled antelope, quail eggs, and caviar. New York’s corrupt mayor, Jimmy Walker, set a new standard for shipboard dandyism: he packed his steamer trunks with forty-four suits, twenty pique vests (to go with his tailcoats), twelve pairs of trousers, and a hundred cravats. At the captain’s table, Commodore Sir James Charles of the Cunard Line demanded that male guests don evening dress, complete with military decorations and hereditary medals. A legendary gourmand, he dropped dead during one of his gargantuan feasts aboard Aquitania in 1928.1
As the stock market soared and more people embarked on the European “Grand Tour,” some expressed disapproval of the party atmosphere that prevailed aboard the big liners. “If you are a lover of the seas and the ships that sail them,” one passenger wrote his friend Franklin Roosevelt, “then the Majestic is nothing more than a gorgeous hotel filled with the usual obnoxious crowd… as the steward will tell you, the best class of people travel second class at third class rates.”2 Many old salts felt that the big ships had lost their vitality and purpose, degenerating into floating pleasure palaces catering to the whim of the rich American tourist. “Everybody on the Berengaria, even the dogs,” one officer sniffed, “were ‘socially prominent.’”3