Investigations: The Queen with the Weak Back

In Beaumont, Texas, last week a U.S. Coast Guard board of inquiry sought to solve the mystery of the Marine Sulphur Queen. A 523-ft. converted tanker, the Queen left Beaumont on Feb. 2, bound for Norfolk and points north, with a full cargo of molten sulphur. The ship’s last radio report, on Feb. 3, placed it 230 miles southeast of New Orleans. Two weeks later, pieces of a raft, a life vest, a broken oar washed up on Florida beaches. There had been no S 0 S, no warning of trouble. The Sulphur Queen and its crew of 39 had simply disappeared.

But as the Coast Guard conducted its investigation last week, the mystery seemed to lie less in the fact that the Sulphur Queen had disappeared than in wonderment about how it had ever managed to put to sea in the first place.

Corrosion. The ship was a firetrap. Former crewmen, along with a few who had been on vacation when the Queen sailed on its last voyage, testified that leaks occurred regularly in spaces beneath and at the sides of the four big sulphur tanks. Recurring fires in those places had become so commonplace that the ship’s officers even gave up sounding the fire alarm. Emitting a gaseous, rotten-egg stink, the fires burned on and on. When the flames were extinguished, the sulphur cooled, hardened, and caked at the ship’s pumps, corroded electrical equipment, and on at least one occasion shorted out the main generator.

Once, the Queen actually sailed into a New Jersey port with fires smoldering, unloaded her cargo, and sailed off again—still burning. The crewmen were in constant fear and complained to their union. A furloughed crewman, Able Seaman Zack Booth, a huge fellow known to his friends as “Big Brother,” testified that one sailor, now missing, told him: “Big Brother, we are about to burn our house down.”

The Queen had other troubles. Second Mate David Fike told of a ruptured steam coil in one of the tanks, of inoperative automatic temperature gauges, and of worn packing around the screw. Though the ship was scheduled for a drydock inspection in January, the visit was postponed. The Queen, one of the T-2 tankers of World War II vintage, had a characteristic “weak back,” and had to be checked carefully for keel fractures. The drydock inspection was postponed, said Fike, because Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., to whom the ship was chartered, “was behind in its orders of sulphur. The captain was surprised and disappointed.”

Poor Soul. Did the Queen fall apart, or did she explode? The investigators may never find out. But one chemist testified that an explosion was a “great possibility” if the Queen’s ventilation system had failed; one spark could have blown the ship to the bottom.

Said Mrs. Adam Martin, wife of an engineer whose first voyage aboard the Queen was also his last: “I never wanted to be a seaman’s wife, but he had to earn a living. I came to see him off. The poor soul. I felt sorry for him when he first saw his new ship. It looked like an old garbage can afloat.”

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