The Pontiac Incident
In 1995, Andreas Thomas's Knight's Cross Line had been firmly established in the shipping world as a way for families to get the feel of a sea voyage for a very low price. Andreas himself was enjoying his bank account's substantial increase, and (during this period, at least) personally took passage on the maiden voyage of every liner built for his company.
But competiton soon arrived. Jeffrey Collins, the son of a well-known financier, broke away from his father's company and used his trust fund to establish his own passenger line in Galveston. The new Collins Line terminals were just down the channel from the Knight's Cross Line terminals, and the new company offered passage on their ships for nearly 25 % less than the Knight's Cross Line. The only downside was that, while cheaper to operate, their vessels were much smaller, and could not carry as many passengers.
That all changed in September 1995. That month, the Collins Line secretly launched a 42,000-ton ocean liner in Gulfport, Mississippi, and began fitting her out for passenger service. To everyone's surprise, Andreas sent a congratulatory telegram to Jeffrey Collins, welcoming the competition into large-scale passenger service. Collins arrogantly responded he looked forward to "seeing the Knight's Cross ships either painted in Collins Line colors or tied up at scrapyards around the world".
In January 1996, the new liner, christened Pontiac after the Native American chieftain, arrived in Galveston and began provisioning for her maiden voyage. The maiden voyage began on 14 February 1996, with a gala departure witnessed by the crews of several Knight's Cross liners. Helicopters and news crews followed the ship for nearly ten miles into the Gulf of Mexico filming the ship before turning back to shore.
All went well until the early morning hours of February 16. At 2:18 AM, Pontiac suffered an explosion in her forward boiler room. It set off a chain reaction, with three other boilers going up, blowing out her sides in that area and sending flames shooting out of her forward funnel. Exactly two minutes later, a second, even more powerful explosion caused the ship to break in half between her first and second funnels, the weakest spot in the hull due to a design flaw that made the executive suites and bridge a separate portion of the superstructure that were connected only by two sets of stairs.
The stern section, still underway at 24 knots, plowed forward until it rammed the bow section, causing even further damage. Pandemonium ensued aboard, and four of the ship's twenty lifeboats were rendered useless immediately (Boats 1 and 2 by the collision and Boats 3 and 4 by the second explosion). At 2:21 AM, the forward funnel, its position weakened by the damage, suddenly broke free of its mounting and crashed downward, slamming against the second funnel and bringing it down as well.
By 2:26 AM, the stern section had ceased moving forward, as the ship's propellers had by now lifted clear of the water. In a panic, the ship's deckhands cut the lifeboats free of their davits and pushed them overboard, telling the passengers to jump for the boats. At 2:37 AM, both the bow and stern sections stood on end and sank. Tragically, with the radio room being at the bow, power to this area had been cut off with the first boiler explosion, and no distress signal or radio message was able to be sent. Of the 1,456 passengers and crew on board, 1,281 died with the ship, including Jeffrey Collins' fianceé and her mother and sister. Only 175 survivors were pulled from the water when the Knight's Cross liner Conte di Savoia happened to pass by the scene nearly two days later.
The fallout from the disaster was tremendous. Of the ten major investors in the Collins Line, eight pulled their support within ten days of the news breaking. Then came a landslide of lawsuits by the families of nearly everyone on board. These events sounded the death knell for the Collins Line. Within weeks, the company began selling off its vessels to pay for the lawsuit settlements, and construction of a new, even larger liner in Gulfport (she was to have been named Colossus and would have been the flagship of the Collins Line) was halted immediately. The ship, only 23% complete at the time of the Pontiac disaster, was bought, ironically, by the Knight's Cross Line, which ordered construction resumed. She was completed in June 1997 as the Hindenburg, and later served as a hospital ship during the Imperial-American War.
Rumors circulated among the surviving employees that Collins Financial Group would bail out the dying company, but this was proven to be false when Jeffrey Collins committed suicide on April 17, 1996 after his father informed him that the board of Collins Financial Group had refused to bail the Collins Line out of bankruptcy. On May 29, the Collins Line ceased operations for good, and the name and the events associated with it were consigned to the pages of history.
![[ img ]](http://i905.photobucket.com/albums/ac253/ijnfleetadmiral/Pontiac-1.png)
The S.S.Pontiac as completed. The weak spot in the superstructure where the boiler explosion tore the ship in half can be clearly seen.
![[ img ]](http://i905.photobucket.com/albums/ac253/ijnfleetadmiral/Hindenburg-1.png)
The would-have-been Collins Line flagship S.S. Colossus, bought by Andreas Thomas while still under construction and completed as the Knight's Cross Line's I.M.S. Hindenburg.
-Matt
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