Background
Hired by the Bacheller newspaper syndicate to serve as a war correspondent during the Cuban insurrection against Spain, the 25-year-old Stephen Crane boarded the filibustering steamship SS Commodore on New Year's Eve, 1896. The ship sailed from Jacksonville, Florida, with 27 or 28 men and a cargo of supplies and ammunition for the Cuban rebels. On the St. Johns River, less than 2 miles (3 km) from Jacksonville, Commodore struck a sandbar in a dense fog and damaged its hull. Although towed off the sandbar the following day, it was again beached in Mayport, Florida, and further damaged. A leak began in the boiler room that evening, and as a result of malfunctioning water pumps, the ship came to a standstill about 16 miles (26 km) from Mosquito Inlet (now called Ponce de León Inlet). As the ship took on more water, Crane described the engine room as resembling "a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of Hades."
Commodore's lifeboats were lowered in the early hours of the morning on January 2, 1897, and the ship sank at 7 a.m. Crane was one of the last to leave the ship in a 10-foot (3.0 m) dinghy. He and three other men (including the captain, Edward Murphy) floundered off the coast of Florida for a day and a half before attempting to land their craft at Daytona Beach. The small boat, however, overturned in the surf, forcing the exhausted men to swim to shore; one of them, an oiler named Billie Higgins, died. The disaster was front-page news in newspapers across the country; rumors that the ship had been sabotaged were widely circulated but never substantiated.
Crane was reunited with his partner, Cora, several days after the ordeal, and quickly wrote his initial report of the sinking while waiting in Jacksonville for another ship. Desperate for work, he soon left for New York to secure a job covering the impending Greco-Turkish War. Crane completed the story that would become "The Open Boat" a few weeks later, in mid-February. According to fellow correspondent Ralph D. Paine, Crane had the opportunity to show the first draft of the short story to Murphy when Crane again passed through Jacksonville. When Crane asked his opinion, Murphy allegedly replied, "You've got it, Steve ... That is just how it happened, and how we felt. Read me some more of it".
Read more about this topic: The Open Boat
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