Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Theodate too was a member of the society, an organization founded in London in 1882, not by crackpots or would-be mediums, but by philosophers, writers, scientists, and journalists who sought to bring the principles of scientific rigor to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. Its membership included dozens of scientific and literary notables, among them H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, William James, and Oliver Lodge, a leading British physicist who would lose his own son to the war in September 1915 and spend the rest of his life trying to reach him beyond the veil. From time to time Theodate had assisted Lodge and James in an investigation of Mrs. Piper, the medium, for which James convened seventy-five séances. The medium’s apparent talents so resisted his attempts to debunk her skills that James came to believe she might be legitimate. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, famously, “you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.”

  Theodate also participated in séances independently of William James and in an unpublished memoir described a 1909 sitting with another famed medium, Eusapia Palladino, during which Theodate claimed her own turban levitated from her scalp and settled on the table in front of her. Palladino was subsequently proven to be a very talented fraud.

  Theodate began serious study of the powers of the mind and the occult in her thirties. In 1900, at thirty-three, she read her first issues of Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which included investigations of supposed hauntings and incidences of “survival,” the society’s preferred term for life after death; the Proceedings were also where Sigmund Freud in 1912 published his first detailed articulation of his theory of subconscious thought. Theodate joined the society in 1904 and soon afterward began helping William James with his investigation of Mrs. Piper. (James’s brother Henry, though the author of ten ghost stories including Turn of the Screw, scorned spiritualism and paranormal dabbling.) In 1907, the year Theodate turned forty, she helped found a new institute for psychical research in New York and contributed $25,000, over $600,000 today. Her traveling companion, Edwin Friend, had been editor of the institute’s journal until a decidedly non-astral conflict over what sorts of articles to publish led to his removal. Though only in his twenties, Friend had already received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard and had taught classics at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. Theodate, angered by his removal, resigned from the institute’s board. Her reason for traveling with him now on the Lusitania was to visit Oliver Lodge and others in London to seek support for the founding of a wholly new American society.

  Bergson’s book was in French, but Friend translated as he read. This was no mean feat. Matter and Memory was a stupefying read in any language. Yet there they sat, contentedly filling the warm afternoon air with murmured language and knowing smiles, grasping the ungraspable.

  “There were passages that illustrated so wonderfully some of the common difficulties in communication,” Theodate wrote—and by communication she meant contact with the dead. “They were most illuminating and I could see the vividness of the inspiration they were to Mr. Friend; and as we sat side by side in our deck chairs I marveled to myself that such a man as Mr. Friend had been found to carry on the investigations. I felt very deeply the quality of my respect and admiration for him. He was endowed so richly in heart and mind.”

  She saw Friend as an intellectual helpmate and believed that in coming years he would be an important, albeit platonic, presence in her life.

  AMONG THE younger crowd, shipboard life gained a new intensity with the end of the voyage so near. New-made friends asked each other to sign memento books. Flirtations became more flirty; the ongoing sporting competitions more zesty, with prizes offered at the ship’s barbershop. The boundaries between families began to blur. Children roamed the deck in packs, led by stewardesses. One stewardess had charge of twenty-two children, whom she watched while their parents dined. Ethel Moore Lamping Lines, thirty-four, traveling with her husband, Stanley, befriended a young couple from Toronto who were on their way home to Scotland with their three children: a toddler and a pair of one-and-a-half-year-old twins. “All around us were nice little growing families,” Mrs. Lines wrote, “and all so happy.”

  She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. “Our stewardess laughed,” Mrs. Lines recalled, “and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, Captain Turner and Staff Captain Anderson toured the ship to make sure all the lifeboats were in fact swung out and ready for lowering. Turner also ordered Anderson to see that all the ship’s portholes were closed, up to B Deck, and that all bulkhead doors likewise were closed.

  As of noon Thursday, the ship was 465 miles west of Ireland’s Fastnet Rock, and moving at 21 knots.

  U-20

  CHANGE OF PLAN

  ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, WITH U-20 SUBMERGED and headed out to sea, Schwieger made his decision: he resolved to abandon his effort to reach Liverpool, despite his orders. Within the culture of U-boat leadership, this was his prerogative. Out of touch with superiors and friendly vessels, only a commander could know how his patrol was unfolding and what threats or challenges he faced. Still, Schwieger devoted nearly a full page of his War Log to his rationale.

  The weather was the biggest factor in his decision. The barometer, and the fog that had dogged his course all day and the previous night, and the strangely calm weather—here he used the lovely German word Windstille—suggested to him that the fog would linger for days. “The poor visibility,” he wrote, “makes it impossible to sight the numerous enemy patrols, trawlers and destroyers, which may be expected in the St. George[’s] Channel and the Irish Sea; therefore we will be in constant danger and compelled to travel submerged.”

  He assumed that any troop transports leaving Liverpool would do so at night, with destroyer escorts. The only way to spot these ships was to remain on the surface, he wrote, but doing so in fog and darkness was too dangerous, both because of the risk of being run over and because the destroyers—fast and heavily armed—could not be spotted in time for him to evade attack.

  Also, he had only three torpedoes left, of which he wanted to hold two in reserve for his return journey, standard practice for U-boat commanders.

  And then there was the fuel problem. If he continued forward to Liverpool, his supply would run so low that he would be unable to return by the same route that had brought him here. He would be forced to take the North Channel, between Scotland and Ireland. While the route had become much safer for British merchant ships, for U-boats it had become increasingly dangerous. The last time he had gone that way he had encountered heavy patrols and unceasing danger. He vowed not do it again “under any circumstances.”

  He planned to continue attacking ships, he wrote, but in waters well short of Liverpool, at the entrance to a different passage—the Bristol Channel—through which ships traveled to reach the English port cities of Swansea, Cardiff, and Bristol, “since chances for favorable attacks are better here and enemy defensive measures lesser than in the Irish Sea near Liverpool.” Though he had only one torpedo available for immediate use, apart from his two in reserve, he had plenty of shells. He resolved to continue attacks until two-fifths of his remaining fuel was used up.

  But once again he was stymied by the weather. At 6:10 that evening he looked through his periscope and again found only fog, with visibility limited to 30 yards in any direction. He continued out to sea, beyond the heaviest lanes of traffic, to spend the night. He planned to surface the next morning, Friday, to run his diesels and recharge his batteries, in preparation for the day’s hunting.

  LUSITANIA

  MESSAGES

  THERE WAS DINNER, OF COURSE, AS ELABORATE AND filling as usual, though now more appreciated, given that this was the second-to-last dinner of the voyage before arrival in Liverpool on Saturday morning.

  As the p
assengers dined, one of the ship’s Marconi men picked up a message chattering through the ether. The time was 7:50 P.M. The message, sent en clair, meaning in plain English, was from the Admiralty’s office in Queenstown, Ireland. The first version must have been distorted, for the Lusitania’s operator asked Queenstown to send it again. The repeat was sent at 7:56. Moments later Captain Turner had the message in hand: “Submarines active off South Coast of Ireland.”

  At about the same time the ship received another message, this one directed to all British ships and sent in a special Admiralty code reserved for merchant vessels. Once decoded, it too was delivered to Turner. The message warned ships in the English Channel to stay within 2 miles of England’s southern coast but ordered those ships en route to Liverpool to avoid headlands, stay in midchannel, pass the entrances to harbors at high speed, and finally take on a harbor pilot at the Mersey Bar to guide them to their wharves in Liverpool. The message ended: “Submarines off Fastnet.”

  Coming one after the other, the two messages were disconcerting—and confusing. The second seemed to contradict itself. On the one hand, it advised ships in the English Channel to stay close to shore. On the other, it recommended that ships on Turner’s route stay in midchannel. It urged captains to race past harbors, but at the same time told them to stop and pick up a pilot at the entrance to the Mersey River. Nor did these messages offer any clue as to the actual number of submarines or their precise locations. The waters off the south coast of Ireland formed an immense expanse of ocean. The phrase “submarines off Fastnet” could mean half a mile or a hundred miles. Together, the two messages suggested waters teeming with U-boats.

  For Captain Turner, one fact was certain: the Lusitania would be passing the Fastnet Rock the next morning and would be off the south coast of Ireland for the remainder of the voyage to Liverpool.

  AFTER DINNER, Preston Prichard led the night’s “whist drive” in the second-class lounge, while in first class the evening concert got under way. The night’s program has vanished from history, but one passenger reportedly dressed up as Bonnie Prince Charlie, in full Highland regalia, and sang six Scottish songs. On past voyages, passengers recited poetry, displayed their skills at “legerdemain,” read aloud from books, and gave “comic recitations”; they sang songs like “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Genevieve,” and “Tip Top Tipperary Mary”; and they showed off their instrumental talents, with solos on the euphonium and mandolin and cello—Godard’s “Berceuse d’Jocelyn” and Schumann’s “Traumerei.” There was one regular feature: each concert ended with the audience standing to sing “God Save the King” and its American cousin, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Same tune, very different lyrics.

  It was here, during intermission, that Turner stepped forward to offer his sobering remarks about submarines and the war zone and assured the audience they would soon be securely in the embrace of the Royal Navy.

  While the concert was under way, a team of officers conducted a night inspection of the ship, another measure prompted by the submarine threat. In addition to wanting all portholes closed, Captain Turner now ordered that they all be curtained to prevent the escape of light, and that all doors that led to outside decks be closed. Turner also turned off the ship’s running lights.

  The inspection team, led by Senior Third Mate John Lewis, checked all the portholes and windows in public rooms throughout the ship, and those that could be examined from the decks, but Cunard rules forbade the men from entering staterooms. The inspection team left a list of open portholes for the room stewards, tucked into a corridor light fixture. Passengers had been instructed to keep their portholes closed, but the weather was so mild that many opened them for ventilation.

  Book dealer Charles Lauriat made it his business to observe the inspections and other shipboard operations. “I was keenly interested in all that was done aboard ship as we approached the Irish Coast,” he wrote, “and in fact all through the voyage I kept my eyes unusually wide open.” That Thursday night, as he walked to his room on B Deck—which, being an interior room, did not have a porthole—he saw the list of open portholes, “stuck right in the lantern as you walk along the passageway.”

  Captain Turner’s concern about open portholes was shared by all captains, whether in peace or war. A porthole was just what its name indicated: a hole in the side of a ship. Under certain conditions, a single open porthole could admit water at a rate of 3.75 tons a minute.

  THAT EVENING a group of passengers got together and formed a committee to teach one another how to put on the new “Boddy” life jackets, “these being of a different pattern from the usual cork waistcoat,” said passenger Arthur J. Mitchell, a representative of the Raleigh Cycle Company. Mitchell had reason to be concerned. In his travels thus far he had survived two shipwrecks.

  Captain Turner approved the idea, Mitchell said, provided “that no suggestion would be made to the passengers that the use of the preservers was in any way imminent.”

  There was enough unease as it was. A first-class passenger named Josephine Brandell, twenty-three years old, was so frightened she decided she could not sleep in her own cabin, and asked another passenger, Mabel Gardner Crichton, forty-two, if she could spend the night in hers.

  Mrs. Crichton assented.

  Wrote Brandell, “She was only too happy to be of any assistance to me and did all she could during that whole night to quiet my nerves.”

  THE SHIP’S Marconi room now received a new message, this of a different sort. It was for Alfred Vanderbilt, from a woman. It read, “Hope you have a safe crossing looking forward very much to seeing you soon.”

  LONDON; WASHINGTON; BERLIN

  TENSION

  NEWS OF THE SINKING OF THE CANDIDATE TOOK TIME to reach the Admiralty. A trawler, the Lord Allendale, stumbled across the ship’s three lifeboats at about three o’clock Thursday afternoon. The men had been adrift in the fog for five hours. The trawler was not equipped with wireless and so could not report the sinking or the rescue until it returned to its base at Milford Haven, on the English coast, far from where the Candidate had sunk. The commander of naval forces at Milford Haven notified the Admiralty of the attack in a telegram sent shortly after midnight.

  A telegram from the Queenstown Naval Center came in that day as well, with another report of a submarine sighted off Daunt Rock, this one at 9:45 that morning. The U-boat had remained “in sight for five minutes” before submerging. This was relayed to Director of Intelligence Hall as well as to First Sea Lord Fisher. A copy also was circulated to Churchill’s office, though he was still in France.

  The HMS Orion continued on its way north, zigzagging in open sea 150 miles west of Ireland.

  IN WASHINGTON, President Wilson struggled anew with depression. Edith Galt’s rejection had cast him into a state akin to grief, to the extent that he found it difficult to concentrate on world events, though these continued to press. The Gulflight was still major news. An inquest by an English coroner had confirmed that the ship’s captain, Alfred Gunter, had died of “heart failure, accelerated by shock, caused by the torpedoing of the ship.” The Gulflight’s second officer testified that the submarine captain had to have realized the ship was American, for the day had been clear and the tanker was flying a large American flag. There was also news of fresh U-boat predations. The Washington Times reported on Wednesday evening that a German submarine, “running amok,” had sunk eleven unarmed fishing trawlers in the North Sea, off England.

  That night, however, Wilson’s attention was focused solely on Edith. He resolved that despite his new grief he would not—could not—let her exit his life. He composed a long letter, really a prose poem of despair, in which he, the man so many Americans thought of as distant and professorial, wrote, “There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”

  He was willing to accept friendship, he told her—for now. “If you cannot give me all that
I want—what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without—it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were—and if you understood,—understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.”

  He made it clear that she would come to love him. “Do not misunderstand,” he added, in one of three impassioned postscripts. “What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it,—I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if anything, the future may have [in] store for me.”

  Not so patient, as it happened, for the next morning, Thursday, May 6, before sending off this letter, he added a codicil that was five pages long.

  He had read her letter again, he told her, and now appraised it in a more hopeful light. “I can hardly see to write for the tears as I lift my eyes from it,—the tears of joy and sweet yearning.”

  For the time being, he chose to position himself as her knight. “I seem to have been put into the world to serve, not to take, and serve I will to the utmost, and demand nothing in return.”

  Edith’s resistance, meanwhile, had begun to waver, but amid a crush of conflicting anxieties. The fact Wilson was president of the United States placed a barrier in her thoughts that she found hard to overcome. His power, his ever-present detail of Secret Service men, his visibility in the public eye, and corollary restraints on his private behavior all complicated matters, as did the simple fact that any woman inclined to marry Wilson was likely to have her motives questioned, given his high office. “There was the fear,” she wrote, “that some might think I loved him for that; then the terrible thought of the publicity inevitably entailed; and the feeling that I had no training for the responsibilities such a life held.” On the other hand, she felt deep affection for the man. “Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.” She was enthralled, too, by the trust he placed in her and his willingness to discuss with her “all the problems which confronted him and the fears, even then, that the fires of war raging in Europe might leap the Atlantic and involve our own country.”