The Stock Market Crash of 1929 served as a hard blow to even the most egotistical members of America's upper-class society. Millions of investors lost their money and the industrialized western world was now operating at a slower pace. The Dust Bowl only made things worse for those farmers and small-town folk who were living in the mid-west. But for those who did not rely on banks, keeping their currencies and valuables in more personal housings, life was still secure and prosperous.

It was a different situation with the shipping lines of the Northeastern parts of the United States. Almost a hundred years earlier in 1841, a New York businessman named James Ward founded the New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Company, or the Ward Line for short. Over the course of it's history, the company offered vacationers on trips to good old Havana, Cuba. With the Great Depression living up to it's namesake, this gave the company a good business opportunity bring people into a world of escapism that would be too good to last, and all on a cost of low fares. One of it's latest ships in the line of luxury and comfort was the Morro Castle and her sister ship Oriente.

Morro Castle had a 508-foot hull with a beam of 70 feet. She could carry up to 500 passengers with her luxurious cabins and accommodations. 6 watertube boilers drove her two steam turbo electric engines, generating up to 14,000 horsepower. Her displacement weight was 15,870 tons. The cost of building and fully equipping her had reached a total of four million dollars. But the most interesting aspect of the ship was her safety features. She had a system of nine watertight bulkheads with automatic doors and her designer Theodore Ferris was well prepared to add a state-of-the-art fire detecting system and firefighting equipment. These consisted of forty-two hydrants spread out on five decks, a thousand feet of hoses and 100 fire extinguishers. With this grandeur of safety technology Morro Castle was practically inflammable and unsinkable at the same time.

But in September of 1934, when the Great Depression had ended with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and America was in its recovery stages, all was about to change….

This is the story of the passengers and crew who lived through one of the greatest maritime disasters of the 1930s….