As she waited on deck for the excursion steamer General Slocum to leave lower Manhattan for a Long Island picnic grove, Mrs. Philip Straub had a premonition of disaster. Just before the gangway was removed, she rushed ashore. A man she confided her fears to grabbed his wife and five children and followed.

It was a wise decision. Within an hour, flames would race the length of the 264-foot vessel. Screaming passengers would leap into the East River with their clothes on fire, only to be dragged down as their garments, and even lifebelts, became waterlogged. Others would be thrown against cabin walls so hot that the boiling paint seared their skin.

A dozen tugs, two fireboats, a police boat and more than a hundred other vessels would join the rescue effort -- some of them catching fire as they came alongside the Slocum. Charred bodies would surround the flaming ship and litter the shoreline. The Slocum would burn to the waterline, killing more than a thousand passengers and crew in the worst maritime disaster in the New York area's history.

The disaster occurred on June 15, 1904. From its first summer afloat in 1891, the ship, named for Civil War hero Henry W. Slocum, was star-crossed. In the years before the fire, the paddlewheel steamboat managed to run aground six times and collide with four other vessels.

Five weeks before the disaster, the Slocum was checked by the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service, which certified its 13-year-old lifebelts as ``up-to-date and of good quality.'' The inspectors never checked the fire pump and hoses or noticed that the six lifeboats were stuck to the ship by a thick coat of paint.

St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, which served primarily German immigrants in lower Manhattan, chartered the aging Slocum for its 17th annual excursion to the Locust Grove Picnic Ground on Eatons Neck. With the exception of the captain and chief engineer, the Slocum's 35 crew members were inexperienced. The day before the St. Mark's trip, men from the church delivered three barrels of glasses. After they were unpacked, a deckhand stored the barrels filled with packing hay in the forward cabin, even though it was illegal to have loose hay aboard.

At 9:20 a.m., the Slocum headed up the East River from its Third Street dock with 1,331 passengers, more than 500 of them under the age of 20. As the band played, children danced on the deck and passersby waved from the shore. But when the ship reached Astoria, onlookers waved frantically for a different reason -- they could see smoke coming from the portholes.

The story of the disaster is recounted in ``The Burning of the General Slocum,'' a 1981 book by Claude Rust of East Rockaway, whose grandmother died on the ship.

A boy ran up to deckhand John Coakley and cried, ``Mister, there's smoke coming up one of the stairways.'' He opened the cabin door and the smoldering hay in the barrels burst into flame. It was 10 a.m.

Twelve-year-old Frank Perditsky ran to the deck below the pilothouse and yelled up to Capt. William Van Schaick, ``Hey Mister, the ship's on fire!'' The captain dismissed the warning as a prank. ``Get the hell out of here and mind your own business!''

Searching for something to smother the flames, Coakley grabbed two bags of flammable charcoal. Finally he located the first mate, Ed Flanagan, who wasted several minutes by going to see the chief engineer before calling the captain and deploying a fire hose. But when the water pump was turned on, the rotted and kinked hose burst.

As soon as the captain looked out the pilothouse door and saw flames leaping up from the port side and passengers hurling themselves over the rail, he decided the strong following current and the gas plants on the nearby Bronx shore left him only one choice for a place to beach. ``Put her on North Brother Island,'' he told the pilot.

The island, near today's LaGuardia Airport, was only three minutes away. Passengers with their clothes on fire vainly sought safety. Some tried to pull loose the wire mesh holding life preservers to the ceilings. ``Some of them we could not budge, and others pulled to pieces and spilled the crumbs of cork all over our heads,'' recalled Annie Weber, who escaped over the side on a rope.

The Slocum grounded on a rocky ledge with its stern still in deep water. The captain, his hat on fire, scrambled over the rails along with passengers. Anna Frese, 14, would remember that ``my father told me to jump, but I could not get my hand off -- it was baked on the rail with the paint.'' When she managed to free herself, ``I had to be careful to clear the paddlewheel, as people were being caught [in it] and died; so I tried to jump out far enough, and I struck a rock and broke all my front teeth.''

As the medical staff of hospitals on the island aided some victims, a few people on shore or in boats took advantage of them -- stripping them of their jewelry or demanding money before pulling them out of the water.

The death toll was ultimately set at 1,021. An inquest determined the fire was started by a cigarette or match tossed into one of the barrels. The inquest jury indicted the captain, first mate, officers of the steamboat company and a steamboat inspector.

But only the captain was convicted -- of not holding fire drills, not training the crew properly and not maintaining fire apparatus. Sentenced to 10 years, he was paroled after 3/12 years when 250,000 people signed a petition to President William Howard Taft.

What was left of the Slocum was converted to a barge. It sank in a 1911 gale near Atlantic City.

The Slocum's victims are memorialized by two monuments. One is in Tompkins Square in Manhattan, near where St. Mark's was located. The other is at Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, where 61 unidentified victims were buried. That monument was unveiled a year after the fire by 1 1/2-year-old Adella Wotherspoon, the youngest person to escape. The New Jersey resident, who lost two sisters and two cousins in the fire, is one of the two Slocum survivors known to still be alive.

``I just know what I was told by my parents,'' she said recently. ``I was on the ship with my mother and father, two sisters and two cousins and an aunt and uncle. My mother was very badly burned on her upper left side so I assume she had hung on to the railing until she couldn't hold on any longer and dropped into the water with me in her right arm.

``The men stayed on board looking for the other four children until their clothes burned off and then they jumped overboard. We were reunited on the island.''

Every year on a weekend in June, the Organization of the General Slocum Survivors holds a memorial service at the cemetery.