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By Root 1708 0

all engines stopped and the lifeboats lowered. The conduct of the crew was disorganized and shamefully inept. The blaze spread across the ship, creating an impassable barrier of flames between bow and stern. The lifeboats were so carelessly lowered over the side one actually fell into the ocean, bottom up. As another lifeboat was lowered on the port side, passengers saw that only nine crewmen were occupying it; they said the boat “belonged to them.” Still another lifeboat, afloat under the command of the ship’s assistant engineer, John Freaney, immediately took on water and began to sink. Freaney rowed to a lifeboat commanded by crewman James Culmer and demanded that his passengers be transferred to Culmer’s more seaworthy vessel. Culmer refused, saying he had enough on board.

“Your boat could hold more,” Freaney called out. Culmer responded by throwing a bucket to Freaney and leaving him and his passengers to their fate. Everyone aboard started bailing. They had the bucket and four oars.

What followed was utter hell. In the lifeboat they were sitting in, water was waist deep, and there was nothing to eat or drink. It was like this for four unbearable days. A crewman died of thirst; two others, suffering from dehydration and hypothermia, went “crazy” and jumped overboard, never to be seen again. Another man, in a state of delirium, tossed the bailing bucket overboard. Now they were left with nothing but two hats to bail with. On the fifth day, they made a sail out of their life preservers. At last, on the eighth day, they sighted land: Abaco, the northernmost island in the Bahamas archipelago. In a state of exhaustion, they landed on the beach and came upon a spring of fresh water and a deserted house. They discovered a few tomatoes that they boiled in a pot. This was their first taste of food since the Missouri had gone down. On the tenth day, they were about to give up and surrender to death when they saw a sloop cruising off the island. Freaney hoisted his clothes on the oar and signaled. They were rescued—Freaney and the three other crewmen who were left alive.

The disaster at sea was huge news in America. In total, sixty-six souls had been lost. When the first telegrams reporting the calamity reached Buffalo, Grover Cleveland rushed to Holland Patent to comfort his mother. He arrived at a scene of hopeless misery. Five of his siblings were there too—his brother Reverend William Cleveland and his sisters Mary, Louise, Susan, and Rose. Only the eldest, Anna, the missionary in Ceylon, was unaware of the family misfortune. All of Holland Patent was in mourning. A woman from the village named Mary, who had been hired by Fred and Cecil to work at the Royal Victoria Hotel, had also been on board the Missouri. Like the Cleveland brothers, she too was unaccounted for.

Ann Cleveland was a beloved figure in the village–an “estimable lady,” in the words of the Utica Morning Herald. Fred and Cecil were also popular and respected, not only for their wartime service to the nation but also for their devotion to their mother. Just the past summer, they had spent several weeks with Mrs. Cleveland, keeping the elderly widow company. For three weeks, Grover and the others waited for word of them, praying for a miracle.

Then, on November 21, the steamship Morro Castle arrived in New York City. It had left Nassau four days earlier and carried fifteen Missouri survivors. These included “a servant of Mr. Cleveland, the lessee of the R. V. Hotel, who was on board the Missouri at the time of her loss,” The New York Times reported. Grover must have read the newspaper report with cold fury. The article quoted crewmen as saying the Missouri had been “hastily prepared” for the voyage and that the boilers in the engine room had been improperly fitted with insulation. That could explain the cause of the fire: Heat from the boiler would likely have ignited the ship’s woodwork.

“The responsibility for this catastrophe indisputably rests on those who sent the Missouri to sea in the condition she was in,” the Times reported.

It sounded like pure