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Isaac Bell raced down the grand staircase.
Captain Turner was running up the stairs, heading for the bridge, shouting orders to turn the Mauretania away from the wind to keep it from fanning the flames.
Bell ran to the fire. His prisoner was trapped in the baggage room in the bow. He had to get the man and his PS guard to safety.
The bugle shrieked the alarm. Fight fire! Fight fire!
Passengers milled. Stewards tried to calm them but had no answers to their frightened questions. The ship heeled, leaning away from a sharp turn that put her stern to the weather. The decks lurched. Ship’s officers bellowed into megaphones: “Passengers to the boat deck. All passengers to the boat deck.”
The stewards began pleading with people to put on their life vests.
A woman screamed.
* * *
Isaac Bell smelled smoke before he got close enough to see the fire. It was a bitter chemical blend of coal tar and gunpowder oddly layered with sweet whiffs of brandy. Suddenly he saw flames explode from the end of a corridor. It was as strikingly bright a fire as he had ever seen, with an intense white-orange color. He felt the heat fifty feet away.
He saw a band of stewards whose uniforms had been burnt to smoldering rags stagger from a cross-corridor dragging a hose. Bell ran to help them charge the flames. They were led by a tall man singed half bald. His green eyes blazed in a face black with soot.
“Archie?”
“How was dinner?” asked Archie, striding into the burning baggage room, spewing steam from the hose.
“You O.K.?”
“Tip-top. Most of the explosion went up the hatch, and our PS boy did himself proud getting Block out.”
“What’s burning?”
“Nitrate film stock. Clyde says it feeds on its own oxygen.”
Bell asked, “Any more hoses?”
“This is steam. There’s a saltwater hose in the companionway.”
Bell unreeled it and followed Archie into the burning room. “Where’s Clyde?”
“He went up the hatchway ladder to vent the fumes.”
Bell looked at the square opening in the ceiling. The bitter, undoubtedly poisonous smoke was billowing up it. “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. It blew soon after he left. But it looks to me like he got the hatch open. Unless it blew open.”
Three dozen seaman streamed down from their sleeping berths directly above the fire. Stewards joined them, mobbing the forward baggage room with long hoses, directing steam and salt water into the furious orange maw of poisonous smoke and intense heat that threatened the ship. The water tended to spread the burning film, scattering it. The steam was better at smothering it. As they fought to confine the fire to the baggage room, paint on surrounding bulkheads was bubbling from the heat, all three automobiles exploded, and the brandy, a dining saloon steward shouted, threatened to “turn the bloomin’ ship into Maury flambé.”
With the crew fighting the fire, and his saltwater hose a less effective extinguisher than the low-pressure steam that Archie refused to relinquish, Isaac Bell ran up the companionways looking for Clyde. He could see that the steel hatchway that rose forty feet from the baggage room to the foredeck had directed the flaming force of the explosion straight up like an enormous square cannon, past the cram-packed quarters of seamen and stewards on the upper deck, and past the officers’ mess hall on the shelter deck. He stepped out on the open foredeck. A pillar of flame and smoke pouring skyward from the open hatch lighted the Mauretania’s mast, vents, and smokestacks bright as day.
He found Clyde Lynds sprawled facedown on the spare anchor, coughing and retching the poison fumes out of his lungs and gulping water from a bucket held by a pair of black and greasy stokers, who pounded him on the back and poured more water into him, shouting, “Good lad. Spit it up, lad. Spit it up. You’ll be right as rain.”
They told Isaac Bell that they had just sneaked out for a breath of fresh air on the dark foredeck when they heard his frantic pounding on the hatch. “Undogged the hatch, he did, but it was too heavy for him to lift. Good luck we was there to help him out. And we opened it just in the nick. The lad’s a bloomin’ hero, he is. Saved the ship. Spit it up, lad! Spit it up.”
* * *
Late that night, Isaac Bell interviewed Archie Abbott, Clyde Lynds, the Mauretania’s chief purser, and finally the bosun’s mate, who had operated the winch that had loaded cargo and luggage down the forward hatch the day they sailed from Liverpool. He reported privately to Captain Turner on the bridge.
“As you know, the entire contents of the forward baggage room were incinerated. Nothing remains but ash, so hot was the fire. But I can tell you with some confidence that the fire was caused by the spontaneous explosion of a large shipment of deteriorating celluloid film stock. I’m sure you’re aware that film-stock smugglers profit by going around the Edison Trust to sell to independent manufacturers who can’t buy direct from Eastman Kodak.”
The mariner was livid. “I will personally hang them from Mauretania’s foremast if I ever got my hands on them. This has happened time and again in the past year, endangering ships at sea.”
