Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Once confident that the destroyers were gone, Schwieger ordered U-20 to the surface.

  And there the final mystery was solved. In backing from the net, the boat had snagged a cable attached to one of the buoys. The buoy had followed on the sea above like a fisherman’s bobber, revealing to the destroyers’ lookouts every change of course, until darkness at last made the buoy invisible.

  Schwieger was lucky. In coming months, the British would begin hanging pods of explosives off their submarine nets.

  THROUGHOUT FRIDAY, April 30, as U-20 passed from the Heligoland Bight, Schwieger’s wireless man continued to send messages reporting the submarine’s position, apparently in an effort to determine the maximum range for sending and receiving signals. The last successful exchange was with the Ancona at a distance of 235 sea miles.

  By seven that evening the U-boat was well into the North Sea, traversing the Dogger Bank, a seven-thousand-square-mile fishing ground off England. The winds picked up, as did the seas. Visibility diminished.

  The submarine passed several fishing boats that flew Dutch flags. Schwieger left them alone. He signed his log, thereby marking the official end of the first day of the cruise.

  LUSITANIA

  MENAGERIE

  THAT FRIDAY, CHARLES LAURIAT LEFT HIS SISTER’S apartment and traveled crosstown to 645 Fifth Avenue to pick up the final component of the collection of items he was bringing to London. He went to the home of a client named William Field, who, despite his address, described himself as a “gentleman farmer.”

  A few months earlier, Lauriat had sold Field a rare volume of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published in December 1843. This copy had belonged to Dickens himself and was the one he entered into evidence in a series of legal actions he brought in early 1844 against “literary pirates” who had republished the story without his permission. On the inside of the book’s front and back covers, and elsewhere within, were notes about the lawsuits that had been jotted by Dickens himself. It was an irreplaceable work.

  Lauriat wanted to borrow it. Earlier in the year he had corresponded with a London solicitor who had written an account of Dickens’s piracy litigation. The solicitor had asked Lauriat to bring the book with him on his next visit to London so that he could copy the various notations within. Its new owner, Field, “agreed rather unwillingly to do this,” Lauriat wrote, and only after Lauriat promised to guarantee its safety.

  Lauriat met Field at his apartment, and there Field handed over the book, a handsome volume bound in cloth and packaged in a “full Levant box,” meaning a container covered in the textured goatskin used in morocco bindings. Lauriat placed this in his briefcase and returned to his sister’s apartment.

  AT PIER 54, on Friday morning, Turner ordered a lifeboat drill. The ship carried forty-eight boats in all, of two varieties. Twenty-two were Class A boats of conventional design—open boats hung over the deck from cranelike arms, or davits, strung with block and tackle. The smallest of these boats could seat fifty-one people; the largest, sixty-nine. In an emergency, the boats were to be swung out over the sea and lowered to the deck rails so that passengers could climb in. Once the boats were filled, two crewmen would manage the ropes—the “falls”—at the bow and stern of each boat and through careful coordination lower the boat in such a way that it would enter the water on a level keel. This was like being lowered down the face of a six-story building. Given that a fully loaded lifeboat weighed close to ten tons, the process took skill and coordination, especially in rough weather. But even in the best conditions it was a hair-raising operation.

  The other twenty-six boats were “collapsibles,” which looked like flattened versions of the regular boats. Capable of holding forty-three to fifty-four people each, these had canvas sides that had to be raised and snapped into place to make the boats seaworthy. The design was the product of a compromise. After the Titanic disaster, ocean liners were required to have enough lifeboats for everyone aboard. But in the case of a ship as large as the Lusitania, there simply was not enough room for all the Class A boats that would be necessary. The collapsibles, however, could be tucked underneath and lowered from the same davits after the regular boats were launched; in theory, they could also float free when a ship sank. The designers, however, seemed not to have taken into consideration the possibility that the boats might end up in the water before being properly rigged, with scores of panicked passengers hanging on and blocking all efforts to raise the sides. Taken together, the Lusitania’s lifeboats could seat as many as 2,605 people, more than enough capacity for all the ship’s passengers and crew.

  For the Friday drill, the ship’s men were mustered on the boat deck, and the conventional boats were swung out from the hull. The boats on the starboard side were swung out over the wharf, but ten on the port side were lowered to the water, and several were rowed a distance from the ship. All were then raised back to the deck and returned to their positions.

  It was Turner’s belief, as he told his questioners during that morning’s Titanic deposition, that an experienced and competent crew, operating in calm weather, could launch a boat in three minutes. But as he well knew, mustering such a crew was by now a near impossibility. The war had created shortages of labor in every industry, but especially shipping, with the Royal Navy drawing off thousands of able-bodied seamen. What made raising a crew even harder for Turner was the fact that Cunard’s original deal with the Admiralty required that all the ship’s officers and at least three-quarters of its crew had to be British subjects.

  The unskilled character of Britain’s wartime merchant crews was sufficiently pronounced that it drew the attention of U-boat commander Forstner, the man who had sunk the Falaba. He noted “the awkward way the men usually handled the lifeboats.” Passengers also took notice. James Baker, a trader of oriental carpets, came to New York aboard the Lusitania earlier in the year, the first crossing with Captain Turner back in command. Baker idled away a portion of the first day of the voyage just watching the crew at work. His conclusion: “Some of them, I do not think could have been to sea before.” He was struck by the haphazard way most of the men dressed. “The crew, with the exception of 4 or 5 … were in all sorts of costumes, confirming my first impression that outside of a few permanent men the balance of the crew were the type one sees on a tramp, a disgrace to such a ship.”

  Turner acknowledged the problem. His wartime crews bore no semblance to the sturdy and capable “sailormen” he had encountered earlier in his career. “The old-fashioned able seaman who could knot, reef, splice or steer disappeared with the sailing ships,” Turner said. As to the crew’s ability to handle lifeboats: “They are competent enough—they want practice. They do not get practice enough, and they do not get the experience.”

  For this upcoming voyage, however, Turner did manage to hire a number of hands who not only were experienced mariners but had gone to sea as he had done, aboard large square-rigged sailing vessels. One such was Leslie “Gertie” Morton, eighteen years old, close to achieving his second-mate’s certificate, or “ticket.” According to his official seaman’s record, he was five feet, ten and a half inches tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. He also had two tattoos: crossed flags and a face on his left arm, a butterfly on his right. These were important details, should he be lost at sea and his body later recovered. He and his brother, Cliff, had signed aboard a square-rigger, the Naiad, as apprentice seamen, each under a formal agreement that bound them to the ship’s owner for four years. Cliff’s “indenture” was still pending; Leslie had completed his on March 28, 1915.

  Sailing ships were still in wide use in commercial trade, even though voyages aboard them were inevitably slow and tedious. The brothers had arrived in New York after what Leslie Morton termed a “particularly vicious passage” from Liverpool that took sixty-three days with the ship all the while in ballast, meaning empty of cargo. They faced worse to come. In New York they were to pick up a load of kerosene in 5-gallon containers and haul i
t to Australia, then collect a load of grain in Sydney and bring it back to Liverpool. The whole journey promised to take a full year.

  The brothers decided to jump ship, despite Cliff’s obligation to serve out his indenture. Both wanted to get home to take part in the war, which they, like most people, expected would end soon. “We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars,” Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the “nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children.”

  They planned to travel to England as paying passengers and wired home to ask for money to buy second-class tickets. Their father arranged a transfer of funds by return cable.

  The Mortons learned that the next ship home was the Lusitania and bought tickets. They had heard so much about the liner that they felt they had to go to the wharf to see it. “What a sight she presented to our eyes,” Leslie Morton wrote. “She seemed as large as a mountain. She had four funnels and tremendous length and, knowing that she could really move along, we were quite thrilled at the thought of traveling on her.”

  As they were standing on the wharf, staring at the ship, they realized that one of the ship’s officers was staring at them. This proved to be Chief Officer John Preston Piper, who had just come down the gangplank to the wharf. “What are you boys looking at?” he asked.

  They told him they had booked passage for the ship’s upcoming voyage and just wanted to see it.

  He watched them a moment, and asked, “What ship are you off?”

  Morton, hedging the truth, told him they had just fulfilled their indentures and were heading back to Liverpool to take their certification exams.

  “I thought you looked like seamen,” Piper said. He asked the two why they wanted to pay for their voyage when they could work their way across. The Lusitania had just lost ten deckhands who had quit the ship, apparently to avoid having to serve in the British army. “I could use two boys like you,” Piper said.

  “I think there could be more, Sir,” Morton said. “Some of our other shipmates have paid off.”

  Chief Piper told the brothers to be at the wharf Friday morning, “with as many as you can get.”

  The boys congratulated themselves. Now they could refund their tickets and devote their father’s money to other pursuits. “We blew every penny” and spent Thursday night “in luxurious if doubtful surroundings,” Morton wrote.

  In all, eight members of the Naiad’s crew planned to jump to the Lusitania. History is silent on how the Naiad’s captain felt about this. Captain Turner, however, had no reservations about taking the men on and probably did not ask many questions. He needed all the crew he could find.

  THE WAR RAISED other challenges as well. Turner readied the ship in a milieu suffused with fear and suspicion. Every merchant ship that left New York Harbor had to be inspected before departure to make sure, to the extent possible, that all cargo in its holds was identified on its shipping manifest, and that it wasn’t armed, in violation of American neutrality laws. Turner received a visit from the port’s “Neutrality Squad,” under the supervision of Collector of Customs Dudley Field Malone, whose office was empowered to search all ships. Malone was said to be a dead ringer for Winston Churchill, so much so that years later he would be cast as Churchill in a film, Mission to Moscow. The squad conducted its inspection quickly, and Malone issued to Captain Turner a “Certificate of Loading,” which allowed him to take the ship to sea, though Malone later conceded it was a “physical impossibility” to check every parcel of cargo.

  Malone’s office released the Lusitania’s preliminary manifest, a single sheet of paper that listed thirty-five innocuous shipments. As it happened, these shipments were just a fraction of the consignments that were already aboard the Lusitania. A more complete list would be released later, well after the ship had departed, the idea being to keep the information out of German hands as long as possible. For German spies and saboteurs, under the guidance of the German Embassy, were known to be at work along New York’s wharves.

  These spies seemed to have a particular interest in the Lusitania and had long monitored the ship. A report from the German naval attaché in New York, dated April 27, 1915, four days before the Lusitania’s departure, stated, “The crew of the Lusitania is in a very depressed mood and hopes this will be the last Atlantic crossing during the war.” The report noted as well that the crew was incomplete. “It is difficult to service the machines adequately. Fear of the U-boats is too strong.”

  A real possibility existed that German saboteurs might attempt to harm the Lusitania. Cunard took the danger seriously enough that it placed a Liverpool police detective, William John Pierpoint, on board to keep watch during voyages. He occupied stateroom A-1, on the boat deck, and kept to himself. Captain Turner took to calling him “Inspector.”

  THROUGHOUT the day and night, the Lusitania’s crew came aboard, in varying states of sobriety. Leslie Morton and his brother and the other refugees from the Naiad climbed the gangway, still suffering the effects of their previous night on the town. If Morton expected luxurious accommodations aboard the Lusitania, he didn’t get them. He was directed to a bunk three decks down, in a chamber he likened to a “workhouse dormitory.” He was heartened to find, however, that his bunk was right beside a porthole.

  A junior crew member—a bellboy, or “steward’s boy,” named Francis Burrows, age fifteen and a half—was met at the terminal gate by a guard, who told him, “You’re not going to get back this time, sonny. They’re going to get you this time.”

  Burrows laughed and continued on to his berth.

  That evening a group of steward’s boys, under orders not to leave the ship for any reason, decided on a diversion to ease their boredom. The boys, including one Robert James Clark, made their way to a small cargo compartment, known in nautical parlance as a lazaret, and there “began doing something we shouldn’t have been doing,” according to Clark.

  Clark and his accomplices found some electrical wires, then stripped off the insulation and spread the wires on the floor. The boys lay down and waited.

  The ship had many rats. In fact, exactly one year earlier rats had caused a small fire in one of the ship’s public rooms by chewing away the insulation on electric wires running through a wall, thereby allowing two bare wires to touch.

  The boys waited with delight. The rats soon emerged and began following their usual routes through the chamber, unaware of the wires in their paths. “They got electrocuted of course,” Clark said, “that was our pastime. That was Friday night.” In later life, Clark would become Reverend Clark.

  Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot—a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor—fled the ship that night, for points unknown.

  CAPTAIN TURNER also left the ship that evening. He made his way to Broadway, to the Harris Theater on Forty-second Street, and there caught a play, The Lie, in which his niece, a rising actress named Mercedes Desmore, had a starring role.

  Turner also indulged his passion for German food. He went to Lüchow’s at 110 East Fourteenth Street, an easy walk from the Cunard docks, and dined in its Nibelungen Room, where an eight-piece orchestra played a brisk accompaniment of Viennese waltzes.

  THAT EVENING, back at his sister’s apartment, Charles Lauriat showed her and her husband the Dickens book and the Thackeray drawings and explained why he was bringing the drawings to England.

  When he bought them in 1914, from Thackeray’s daughter and granddaughter, Lady Ritchie and Hester Ritchie, of London, he paid a bargain price of $4,500, fully aware that he could sell them in America for five or six times as much. To get the best price, however, he had come to realize that he would need to present the drawings in a more appealing manner. At the moment they were pasted into the two scrapbooks, one drawing per page. He planned to have most of the drawings mounted
individually and framed, but some he wanted to bind in combinations of three or four, in books with full Levant bindings. His main reason for bringing them back to England was so that Lady Ritchie could see them one more time and write a small note about each, thereby providing authentication and an extra element of interest.

  He felt no guilt about paying Lady Ritchie so little for the drawings. That was the way the art business worked, especially if a seller wanted discretion, as the Ritchies did. They insisted that he keep the sale of the drawings as quiet as possible and barred him from attempting to sell them in Britain. He could offer them only in America, and even then he had to do so quietly, without advertising. Lady Ritchie was still smarting from the unexpected sequelae of a previous sale of drawings through a London dealer who had marketed them in a manner that the family found offensive and that had drawn unpleasant publicity and comment.

  Lauriat’s sister and her husband inspected the drawings “with a great deal of interest and admiration,” Lauriat recalled. The husband, George, confessed to liking in particular a drawing entitled The Caricature of Thackeray Himself Stretched Out on a Sofa in the Old Garrick Club, and a series of six sketches “of negroes and their children” on the porch of a small house, which Thackeray had drawn while visiting the American South in the 1850s.

  Afterward, Lauriat packed the book and drawings back into his extension suitcase and locked it.

  ELSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as “Mrs. Piper,” the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic.