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Muhammad Ali takes a last sip of coffee, stealing himself for another shift in the noisy engine room of the cruise ship Prinsendown.

It's just after midnight on October 4, 1980, and Prinsendown is rumbling southwest through the Gulf of Alaska,

on route to its next stop, Japan. Ali misses the strong bitter coffee of his home country. He's Indonesian, as are many of the 200 crew members aboard the ship.

Indonesia is one of the stops on this cruise, and he's hoping he'll get a few hours off to disembark and meet up with old friends.

He tosses his coffee cup in the trash, then swings open the door to the engine room, steps onto a narrow catwalk, ready to begin his nightly routes.

Ali is what's known as an oiler or a greaser. It's his job to do preventative maintenance, making sure all the various parts of the ship's four massive desolensions are well lubricated and running smoothly.

He shares a name with the famous American boxer, Muhammad Ali, but he's no heavyweight. He's short and skinny.

All the better for squeezing through the cramped spaces of the engine room, the clatter of the machinery all around him is almost deafening.

He can just barely hear an engineer calling him over to help change a fuel filter. It's one of the hundreds of tasks that keep the engine room functioning.

The 300 and 19 passengers in the decks above may be fast asleep in their cabins, but the work of the engine crew must continue around the clock.

Ali glances up, engines two and three tower above him on the side, immense blocks of iron and steel that vibrate and rumble with power.

They use diesel fuel to power the ship's propellers, a process that also produces massive amounts of heat.

That heat is mostly dispersed to the huge smoke stack that juts up through the center of the ship, but there is still plenty left over to keep the engine room sweltering, even though the water and the Gulf of Alaska is barely above freezing.

Suddenly, Ali notices a flash out of the corner of his eye. He turns and sees blue flames shooting up from an exhaust pipe.

He's surprised. These pipes can get scalding hot, but he's never seen one catch fire before. Then he sees the problem.

A stream of oil is spurting from a broken supply line and splashing directly onto the exhaust pipe.

The pipe is so hot that the oil is igniting on contact, like lighter fluid on a campfire.

Ali watches in horror as tongues of flame dance up the engine parts, climbing higher and higher. He turns and shouts to his co-worker.

Fire! Fire!

He raises back down the catwalk and up a ladder toward the control room. He needs to report the fire to the officer of the watch, then find a fire extinguisher.

And he doesn't have much time. The fire is small now, but in the hot cramped engine room, it could spread fast and the lives of all 500 people aboard Princeton Dead could be in danger.

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