USAT General Stuart Heintzelman's Master, Captain CM Pedersen (1884-1948)

Updated 16 January 2023

The man responsible for getting the Heintzelman from Bremerhaven to Fremantle was the ship's master, Captain CM Pedersen. The Souvenir Edition, 1st Sailing to Australia, contains both a drawing of the Captain in profile, and a profile in words.  

When I first published this blog entry on 2 October 2021, I had been unable to find any more information on Captain Pedersen.  This was despite numerous searches in what would normally be reliable sources.  The block was that I could use only his initials, not his given names.  There was more than one CM Pedersen enlisted in the US military at the same time as him.

The way through the block was provided by the West Australian of 29 November 1947, which had been kind enough to print Pedersen's first name and middle initial.  He actually was Cort M Pedersen.  The West Australian had misspelt the family name as 'Petersen', another impediment to the search.  My thanks here to Jonas Mockunas for providing the hint which got me through the block.

Let's start with the two portraits from the Souvenir Edition.

Captain CM Pedersen

Captain CM Pedersen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1884. He started to go to sea in 1901 on a Danish ship, then sailed on Norwegian, British and American sailing ships. In 1907 he started to sail on steamships from San Francisco. When the First World War began Captain Pedersen went in the US Navy active service and since the end of the war he has been sailing with the New York-Cuba mail SS Co for 22 years. Since 1941 he is attached to the US Army Transport Service. 

 

The Master says that we have enjoyed a quite pleasant trip, the weather is fine and everything is very good. It is a long passage, but he has been on much longer trips. In l904 he sailed from Hamburg to Newcastle, Australia, around the Cape of Good Hope and it took him 200 days. 

The Master is very pleased with the passengers. He has had to deal with many Baltic people before and some of his best friends are Estonians. The Master says: "Your people are very fortunate to go to Australia. I know Australians, all of them I have ever met had been very wonderful people. I can only say that you will be very happy there. 

"Thank you for all the co-operation I have got from the passengers aboard this ship."

Numerous documents on Ancestry.com, once it was told to look for Cort M Pedersen, provided his full name:  Cort Mathias Pedersen.  He was born in Copenhagen on 17 November 1884.

In the 1910 US Census, he was a 24-year-old lodger in a San Francisco household of seven others born in Denmark.  All six Danish lodgers gave their occupation as seaman.  He had arrived in the US in 1905.

He married another Dane, Inge Mortensen, in California in August 1910.  They had two sons:  Cort Edward, born in 1912 and Paul Lawrence, born in 1917.

He was in New York City, applying for a Seaman's Certificate of American Citizenship by the summer of 1919.  He had been naturalized in San Francisco on 17 June 1912 and had arrived in New York as the Master of a vessel called the Imperator.  Fortunately for us, the application includes three photos of the ship's master, two taken around the time of the application.

Two photos of Cort M Petersen from 1919, aged 34

Cort Pedersen served with the US Navy during World War I, having the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade.  He was discharged in July 1919 but is recorded in the 1920s as being in the US Merchant Marine Naval Reserve.

Cort was indeed 'sailing with the New York-Cuba mail SS Co' between the World Wars.  The actual name of the company employing him was the Atlantic, Gulf & West Indies Steamship Inc, known as Agwilines.  New York Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists show Cort in and out of that port with great frequency during the 1920s and 1930s.  He generally was sailing to and from Havana, but sometimes Mexican ports were visited also.  The lists have been digitised by Ancestry.com, which has identified 382 entries for Cort M Pedersen between 1920 and 1948.

The amount of public detail on Cort's life and movements available through Ancestry.com is so great that I have set up a separate family tree for him there, rather than trying to reference individual items here.  This tree is accessible at https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180127428/person/282345658226/facts, although you may need to set up a free Ancestry.com Registered Guest account to view it.

Cort Pedersen reached the national headlines in the United States in January 1935.  He was then the Chief Officer of an Agwilines cruise ship called the Mohawk, which veered suddenly across the path of a Norwegian freighter called the Talisman.  The Mohawk sank within an hour, despite the Captain's attempt to beach her at Sea Girt, New Jersey.  By then, the Captain had locked himself in his cabin to go down with his ship.  None of the officers on duty on the bridge survived:  Cort was the only officer of the watch to survive.

A board of enquiry commenced within days of the fatal incident, which had led to a loss of 45 of the 163 passengers and crew.  Cort testified that he was in the chart room writing reports when he heard warning blasts from his ship.  Returning to the bridge, he was advised by the Captain that the new automatic steering gear had failed along with the telegraph to the engine room.  The Captain wanted the ship stopped and managed to convey this to the engine room by telephone.  Meanwhile, Cort was an additional messenger to the engine room, as well as being the officer trying to organise lifeboats.

A board of enquiry concluded that the collision was due mostly to mechanical malfunction or human error on the Mohawk's part. Some suggested that the Mohawk's navigation lights also had failed before the collision.  The damage inflicted by the collision should not have been enough to sink the Mohawk, but it seemed that she had been modified to carry bulk cargoes for extra revenue during the Depression. These modifications had opened up the ship's watertight bulkheads for easier cargo handling. 

Cort was back at sea soon after this fatal drama.  Between 1930 and 1940, he was sometimes the Captain of Agwilines' voyages but often the Chief Officer.  As he advised the Heintzelman passengers' Souvenir Edition, he joined the US Army Transport service in 1941.

Passenger and crew lists for the port of New York, digitised by Ancestry.com, show Cort as the captain of USAT Thistle, a hospital ship travelling to and from Scotland.  After the War, he travelled across the Pacific for at least one voyage of the Thistle between the island of Leyte in the Philippines and Honolulu, Hawaii.  He returned to the Atlantic, captaining voyages to and from Marseilles, France, and Leghorn, Italy, but mostly to and from Bremerhaven, the starting point of the voyage of the Heintzelman to Australia.

Seven months after he started the voyage to Australia, on 31 May 1948, Cort took the Heintzelman from Bremerhaven again, but this time she and the refugees were bound for Peru and Chile.  We know this because the last page of the List or Manifest of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew, required under US law and surrendered in the port of New York, was stamped and signed by US consuls in both Lima and Santiago.

Our ship's master died only one year after safely delivering his charges to Australia on the Heintzelman, on 5 December 1948.  He died in the St Albans Hospital, Queens, the East Coast referral centre for respiratory disorders in the US Navy.  As the Hospital specialised in tuberculosis, this might have been the cause of his early death.  One way or another, he cannot have been a well man during his last voyages.

It is worth looking at the stories of his two sons, since the elder disappeared in dramatic fashion in 1954.  Cort Edward worked in the transport sector, like his father, but on land as a Greyhound bus driver.  He enlisted in the US Army in 1943 and, after the War, continued to serve in the National Guard.  In his youth he had been active in the Boy Scouts.  All of this meant that a sudden disappearance in the early morning of 12 November was quite out of character.

His abandoned bus was found on a South Boston, Massachusetts, street with its headlights on and Pedersen's hat, shoes, jacket and waybills scattered inside.  A canister usually above the driver's seat was on the floor also.  However, with forensic skills typical of the times, the bus was driven into the nearby Greyhound garage rather than being left as a crime scene for police investigation.

Cort Edward and his wife had three daughters, born between 1933 and 1944.  The family advises on a FindAGrave Webpage for his wife that his body was never found and his wife had to arrange for him to be declared legally dead.  

The younger son, Paul Lawrence, seems to have had a much quieter life than his father or brother.  At the time of the 1940 US Census, Paul was working as a bank clerk in New York City.  When he enlisted in the US Army in May 1942, he was recorded as having received a college education (whereas his older brother had left school after eighth grade). 

Paul was discharged from the Army in July 1946.  There is little about him on public record from then on, apart from a couple of residential locations near Los Angeles, on the other side of the country from where he grew up.  We know, however, that he died in Summerville, South Carolina, in 1996, on his 79th birthday.

His first wife had died in Queens, NY, in 1968.  We know from her military headstone that her husband had reached the rank of Lt Colonel in the US Army Reserve.  Given that Paul also was entitled to a military headstone, it is strange that there is no public record of his 1996 burial, just as his brother has no known grave.

Their father, however, has been buried with a military headstone in the Long Island National Cemetery at Farmingdale, New York.  The headstone reveals that he must have been promoted two ranks from Lieutenant (jg) to Lieutenant Commander during the course of his WWI service.  His wife was buried with him after her death 25 years later.

Cort M Pedersen's headstone

Source: FindAGrave.com

There were two other captains aboard this ship but, fortunately, they neither spoiled the cooking (the broth, you know?) nor the voyage.  They were the Transport Commander, Captain Valentine Pasvolsky, and the Transport Surgeon, Captain Wayne H. Stockdale.  Fortunately for us, Ancestry.com has more to say on them, and the fourth man profiled in the Souvenir Edition, Lithuanian-born Escort Officer, Vladas Zibas.  Their portraits follow.

Sources

'Cort Mathias (born Kort, aka Curt) Pedersen', Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180127428/person/282345658226/facts.

FindAGrave, 'Cort Mathias Pedersen', https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/82625444/cort-mathias-pedersen, accessed 2 February 2022.

Põder, RV, E Dēlinš, and R Maziliauskas, 1947. Souvenir Edition, 1st Sailing to Australia, published at sea aboard the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman, 26 November 1947.

Wikipedia, 'Army Transport Service', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Transport_Service, accessed 2 February 2022.

Wikipedia, 'List of ships of the United States Army', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_of_the_United_States_Army, accessed 2 February 2022.