Qualla: Thomas Disaster

Thomas Disaster: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsy1980, CC BY-SA 4.0. At eleven in the morning on 11 December 1875 the quay at Bremerhaven was busy in the ordinary way. The North German Lloyd steamer Mosel was taking on her last cargo before sailing for New York with some four hundred passengers already aboard, most of them Germans emigrating, and the people who had come to see them off were standing where such people always stand. A crane lifted a heavy barrel. It broke loose, hit the pavement, and exploded. About eighty people were killed and more than two hundred injured — and the reason is that a man in a first-class cabin had wanted that barrel to go off in the middle of the Atlantic instead.

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Image: Tsy1980 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Thomas Disaster: The Quay at Eleven

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Alel at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. The Mosel was under Captain Leist that morning; her assigned master, Hermann Neynaber, had fallen ill. She had been towed by the tug Simson and lay temporarily alongside to finish loading. Among the freight was a barrel armoured in iron, unusually heavy, declared as caviar worth ...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Alel at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Thomas Disaster: Ten Days of Clockwork

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joern M, CC BY-SA 3.0. The barrel held roughly 650 kilograms of Lithofracteur, a commercial dynamite made by Gebrüder Krebs & Cie. Inside it sat a clock, commissioned from a clockmaker in Bernburg named Johann Ignaz Fuchs and built to run silently for ten days before releasing a hammer. The intention w...

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Image: Joern M | CC BY-SA 3.0

Thomas Disaster: The Man in the First-Class Cabin

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H. Marutzky, Public domain. Six hours later, at five in the afternoon, someone opened a first-class cabin and found a passenger on the list as William King Thomas, covered in blood with a pistol beside him. He had shot himself twice in the head and was alive, paralysed. Two notes lay nearby: one bidding far...

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Image: H. Marutzky | Public domain

Thomas Disaster: Wulsdorf

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe H. Friese, CC BY-SA 3.0. Many of the bodies could not be recognised. Of the victims, only twenty-two were ever identified. On 14 December, three days after the explosion, forty-one of Bremerhaven's dead were buried together at the Wulsdorf cemetery, where the mass grave remains — which means that a great...

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Image: Uwe H. Friese | CC BY-SA 3.0

Thomas Disaster: What Outlived Everyone

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PhilippN, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Pinkerton agency was hired by the German authorities to unpick the fraud, and the report it produced traced Keith's earlier attempts — Bremerhaven had not been his first idea, only his most successful one. That report later became the backbone of Ann Larabee's 2005 book The D...

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Image: PhilippN | CC BY-SA 3.0