Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  CAPTAIN TURNER was standing on A Deck, just outside the entry to his rooms, when he heard the lookout’s cry that a torpedo was coming. He saw the track and watched it pass below the starboard rail. There was a brief silence, and then a column of water and wreckage erupted from the sea. The shock of the explosion and the sudden list to starboard threw Turner off balance.

  With debris and seawater falling behind him, Turner ran up the stairway to the bridge.

  HOW PASSENGERS experienced the blast depended on where they were situated when it happened. The ship was so long—nearly 800 feet—and so elastic that those standing or seated toward the stern, in the second-class smoking and dining rooms and the Verandah Cafe, or on the stern “counter,” where the deck swept out over the rudder, felt it as a dull thud. Oliver Bernard recalled thinking, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Those closest to the bridge felt the impact in a manner more vivid and tactile. “Water, bits of coal, splinters of wood, etc., coming down on our heads!” recalled Dwight Harris. “I flattened up against the side of the ship, but got soaked!”

  Preston Prichard and Grace French were happily searching for her “double” when they heard the explosion and felt the ship lurch to starboard. “The ship listed so much that we all scrambled down the deck and for a moment everything was in confusion,” she recalled. “When I came to myself again, I glanced around but could find no trace of Mr. Prichard. He seemed to have disappeared.”

  Too frightened to go to her own cabin, Miss French set off to look for a life jacket on deck, apparently unaware that all jackets were stored in passengers’ rooms.

  Out came the watches. William McMillan Adams, nineteen years old and always handy with a timepiece, put the moment of impact at 2:05. “I timed everything,” he said, later. When asked why, he replied, “I just did it; I don’t know why.” Charles Lauriat checked his stem-winding wristwatch and pegged the impact at 9:08 A.M., Boston time, or 2:08 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time. Others put the time at 2:10; this would later become the agreed-upon benchmark.

  Within seconds Lauriat felt the ship roll to the right and tilt toward the bow. “You could feel the two separate motions very distinctly,” Lauriat wrote. “It seemed as if she were going down at once, but then she stopped suddenly as if the sea had met the water-tight bulkheads and she seemed to right herself and even raise her bow a little. This gave me a feeling of security, and I at first thought she would stay afloat.”

  Moments later a second explosion occurred. (The ever-precise William McMillan Adams timed this at thirty seconds after the first.) Its character was different. Where the first had been a single, sharp detonation, this one, Lauriat said, was “very muffled.” A shudder traveled the length of the ship and seemed to rise from deep within the hull, “more like an explosion of a boiler, I should think,” said Lauriat. He was unable to identify the location with any precision. The sound was not “distinct enough,” he said.

  In the dining rooms, the plants set out on tables shifted; glassware fell to the floor.

  MARGARET MACKWORTH and her father, D. A. Thomas, having finished lunch, were about to enter the elevator on D Deck when Thomas joked, “I think we might stay up on deck to-night to see if we get our thrill.”

  Before Mackworth could answer, she heard a dull explosion, not loud, more a heavy thud that rose from somewhere below. “I turned and came out of the lift; somehow, the stairs seemed safer.”

  Her father set off to try to learn more about what had happened. Mackworth, in accord with her earlier plan, went straight to her room on B Deck to get her life jacket. The degree of list made progress difficult. She moved along the lower side of the passage in the angle between wall and floor and collided with an oncoming stewardess. The two, Mackworth wrote, “wasted a minute or so making polite apologies to each other.”

  After retrieving her life jacket, Mackworth ran to her father’s cabin and got one for him as well. She climbed to the open boat deck and moved to the higher side—the port side—judging it safer to be “as far away from the submarine as possible.”

  There she encountered her tablemate Dorothy Conner, and asked if she could stand with her while she waited for her father. She put on her life jacket.

  A crowd of third-class passengers emerged from below, with great energy and noise.

  Mackworth turned to Conner and said, “I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair.”

  “So did I,” Conner replied, “but I’ve learnt a devil of a lot in the last five minutes.”

  CHARLES LAURIAT was standing next to Elbert Hubbard and his wife. He urged them to go to their room and get their life jackets, but the couple seemed paralyzed. “Mr. Hubbard stayed by the rail affectionately holding his arm around his wife’s waist, and both seemed unable to act.”

  Lauriat told Hubbard, “If you don’t care to come, stay here and I will get them for you.” Lauriat set off for his own quarters.

  For the many parents aboard, the blast brought a unique sort of terror. The Cromptons of Philadelphia had six children scattered over the ship; the Pearl family of New York had four. The ship was immense, and older children had the run of its decks. Parents were compelled to hunt for their children among the ever-growing crowds of passengers swarming the boat deck, while at the same time holding babies and corralling toddlers.

  Norah Bretherton, the thirty-two-year-old wife of a journalist in Los Angeles, had booked passage aboard the Lusitania so that she could bring her two children, Paul and Elizabeth, to meet her parents in England. Paul was three years old; Elizabeth—“Betty”—was one and a half. Bretherton, pregnant, was traveling alone with the children because her husband had to stay behind in California to work.

  Her cabin was a second-class room toward the stern of C Deck, the shelter deck. Before lunch she had dropped her daughter off at a “play yard” on the deck above, then placed her son in the cabin for a nap and left him there.

  When the torpedo struck, she was in a stairwell between the two decks. She froze. She had no idea where to go first—up one deck to retrieve her baby girl, or down a deck to get her napping son? All lamps went out. The sudden list of the ship threw her from one side of the stairwell to the other.

  She ran for the baby.

  ON ENTERING the bridge, Captain Turner began issuing commands. He ordered the engines “full astern.” The reverse turbines were the ship’s brakes, the only way to bring it to a stop, and the ship had to be stopped before any lifeboats could be launched with safety. The engines did not respond.

  Turner told the helmsman, Quartermaster Hugh Johnston, to turn the ship hard toward the coast, still a dozen miles off. If worst came to worst, he would beach the ship and at least eliminate the danger of sinking.

  Johnston stood inside the wheelhouse, a small enclosure within the bridge. He repeated Turner’s command to confirm that he understood. He rotated the wheel to produce what should have been a 35-degree turn toward shore.

  “All right, boy,” Turner said.

  The ship responded, according to Johnston.

  Captain Turner now ordered him to “steady” the ship, that is, to adjust the wheel to counter the tendency to continue turning once the desired heading was achieved. Johnston gave the ship 35 degrees helm in the opposite direction.

  “Keep her head on Kinsale,” Turner said, directing Johnston to aim the bow toward the lighthouse on the Old Head. Johnston echoed the order and began its execution.

  This time the helm failed to answer. The ship began to veer, “to pay off,” toward open sea. Johnston attempted to counter the drift. “I was doing all I was supposed to do, steadying the ship,” Johnston said, “but she was swinging off again.” Turner repeated his order for a turn toward shore.

  Johnston tried. “I put the wheel round, but she would not answer her helm but kept on swinging out toward the sea.”

  Turner told Second Officer Percy Hefford to check the ship’s spirit indicator, a marine version of a carpenter’s level, to gauge the severity of the list.
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  Hefford called out, “Fifteen degrees to starboard, sir.”

  Turner gave the order to close the ship’s watertight doors, below the passenger decks, which were operated with a control along the front wall of the bridge. To make sure the doors really did close, Turner told Hefford to go down into the forecastle and check.

  Hefford stopped at the wheelhouse and told Johnston to keep his eye on the spirit indicator and “sing out if she goes any further.” Hefford left the bridge. He did not reappear.

  Turner ordered the lifeboats lowered “to the rails,” that is, to a level where they could be safely boarded by passengers. The boats still could not be launched, however, for sheer momentum continued to propel the Lusitania forward, initially at 18 knots. Had the reverse turbines responded, the ship could have been stopped in under three minutes, but now only the drag of the sea could bring it to a halt. The liner moved in a long arc away from shore. The forced flooding continued.

  At the wheel, Johnston checked the spirit gauge. The list held steady at 15 degrees.

  Turner stepped out onto the bridge wing. Below him, the boat deck was filling with passengers and deckhands. Firemen black with soot worked their way through the crowd like shadows. Some of them climbed out of the ship’s vents.

  DOWN IN QUARANTINE, Robert Kay and his mother felt the torpedo blast, which Robert described as a “violent explosion.” This was followed by a second, more muted eruption that seemed to come from within the ship. The lights went out.

  His mother was tense but oddly calm, Robert recalled, though she expressed concern that in her condition, so deeply pregnant, they might never reach the upper decks safely.

  The door to quarantine was no longer plumb in its frame. They forced it open. The corridor outside was dark, tilted both to starboard and toward the bow.

  They moved slowly. Robert tried to help, but “every step was an effort, and our progress was painfully slow,” he wrote. The combined starboard and forward list made stairways dangerous. The Kays held tight to handrails, “but with each moment it seemed that the surroundings became more and more crazily distorted.”

  Everyone else seemed to have gone. There was quiet, though now and then Robert heard a shout from far above. With great effort, he and his mother worked their way upward.

  Five minutes had elapsed since the initial explosion.

  CHARLES LAURIAT returned to deck, carrying all the life jackets he could. He put his on first, then helped others. These were the new Boddy life jackets. If worn properly, they were effective in keeping even an oversized man afloat, comfortably on his back, but Lauriat saw that nearly everyone around him had put the jackets on incorrectly. Cunard had not yet established a policy of having passengers try on life jackets at the start of a voyage. The only guide was an illustrated instruction sheet posted in each room, in the apparent belief that passengers would have the time and presence of mind to read and follow it. The fault in this logic now became evident. “In their hurry, they put them on every way except the right way,” Lauriat wrote. “One man had his arm through one armhole and his head through the other; others had them on around the waist and upside down; but very few had them on correctly.”

  Lauriat was standing within earshot of the bridge when he heard a woman call out to Captain Turner, her voice steady and calm, “Captain, what do you wish us to do?”

  “Stay right where you are, Madam, she’s all right.”

  “Where do you get your information?” she asked.

  “From the engine room, Madam,” he said. But the engine room clearly had told him no such thing. Apparently he was seeking to calm the crowd below and avoid setting off a panicked race for the boats.

  This was the last Lauriat saw of Turner. Lauriat and the woman now headed back toward the stern, and as they walked they told other passengers what the captain had said.

  Second-class passenger Henry Needham may have encountered the pair, for he recalled that a passenger approaching from the direction of the bridge had shouted, “The Captain says the boat will not sink.”

  “The remark,” Needham wrote, “was greeted with cheers & I noticed many people who had been endeavoring to get a place in the boats, turn away in apparent contentment.”

  Turner’s words merely confirmed what the passengers and many of the crew already believed, or wanted to believe: that no torpedo could cause the ship mortal damage. The ship’s purser and surgeon spent the moments after the two explosions calmly strolling along the boat deck, smoking cigarettes, assuring passengers the ship was not in any danger. And this seemed entirely plausible. The Lusitania was simply too big and too well built to sink. What made the idea even more incongruous was the setting: a gleaming May afternoon, warm and still, the sea smooth and the headlands of Ireland visible in the distance, so green they seemed to luminesce in the sunshine.

  Isaac Lehmann, the New York businessman, did not share this confidence in the ship’s unsinkability. He went to his stateroom to get his life jacket and found that someone had entered his room and taken it. A nervous man, Lehmann feared chaos. “I don’t know what possessed me,” he said, “but I looked in my dress suit case and got hold of my revolver, as I figured this would come in handy in case there was anybody not doing the proper thing.”

  THERE WERE shipbuilders among the Lusitania’s passengers, and at first they too believed the ship would remain afloat. One of them, Frederic J. Gauntlett, an executive with the Newport News Ship Building and Dry Dock Company, was on his way to Europe to meet with builders of submarines with an eye to starting a venture in the United States. He was traveling with the company’s president, Albert Hopkins.

  Gauntlett was at lunch with Hopkins and another shipbuilder, a Philadelphian named Samuel Knox. (It was Knox’s company that had built the Gulflight, the American oil tanker torpedoed a week earlier.) They sat at their usual table, the sixth one back, on the starboard side. They wore suits; the tablecloths were white, and each table had clear glass vases with cut flowers. Sunlight streamed through the windows.

  The room tilted to the right. A vase fell from Gauntlett’s table. “I left my coffee and nuts,” he said, “and rose from the table and shouted to the stewards to close the ports.” As a shipbuilder, he understood the danger posed by open portholes. He shouted half a dozen times. “The stewards evidently had business elsewhere,” he said, “and when they left the dining saloon I followed suit and left the dining room also.”

  He and his lunch mates did not themselves attempt to close the ports, and these remained open. Gauntlett went to the coatrack, got his hat, and retrieved Knox’s as well. They walked up three flights to the boat deck.

  Gauntlett was reassured that the list seemed to stabilize at 15 degrees. He was convinced the angle would not worsen and “never for one moment supposed she was going to sink.” He said as much to a woman standing nearby, surrounded by her children. She asked him what to do. “I told her there was no danger,” he said; the ship “was not going to sink.”

  Gauntlett expected the bulkheads and watertight doors to keep the hull from flooding further, but then he sensed a change. The list became more pronounced, as did the tilt toward the bow, at which point, he said, “I made up my mind that it was up to me to take a look around and see what the trouble was.”

  He made his way to the railing at the forward end of the deck and looked over at the bow below. The forecastle was partially submerged.

  He went to his room and put on his life jacket.

  ALL THE ship’s systems were now dead. The rudder no longer operated. The main electric dynamo had failed. All lights were out; anyone walking along an interior corridor now found himself in blackness. The operator in the Marconi room on the topmost deck switched to emergency power. The two first-class elevators at the center of the ship stalled. According to one account, passengers within began to scream.

  The elevator that provided the only access to the ship’s baggage room also stopped. The scores of men working to get passengers’ luggage
ready for arrival either were dead from the torpedo blast, or would be soon, as water filled the bow. A fireman who escaped Boiler Room No. 2, Eugene McDermott, described a “rush of water that knocked me off my feet.” Many of the dead crewmen were precisely those who would have been assigned to help launch the ship’s lifeboats.

  Now the sea found a new path into the hull. Water began to flow through open portholes, many of which were barely above the water to begin with. Those of E Deck, for example, normally cleared the water by only 15 feet. By one estimate, at least 70 portholes had been left open in the starboard side. Multiplied by 3.75 tons of water per minute per porthole, that meant that 260 tons was entering the ship each minute through the starboard portholes alone.

  It was now about 2:20 P.M., ten minutes since the torpedo struck. For the next few moments, as deckhands and passengers waited for the ship to slow enough to allow the safe launching of boats, there was quiet. “A strange silence prevailed,” said Albert Bestic, junior third officer, “and small, insignificant sounds, such as the whimper of a child, the cry of a seagull or the bang of a door, assumed alarming proportions.”

  FIRST WORD

  THE TELEGRAMS ARRIVED AT THE ADMIRALTY IN LONDON and the Naval Center in Queenstown in rapid and jarring sequence, sent from various points:

  2:15 FROM VALENTIA STATION TO QUEENSTOWN:

  “ ‘LUSITANIA’ IN DISTRESS OFF KINSALE. BELIEVED.”

  2:20 FROM GALLEY HEAD TO ADMIRALTY:

  “ ‘LUSITANIA’ S.E. 10 MILES SINKING BOW FIRST APPARENTLY ATTACKED BY SUBMARINE.”

  2:25 FROM QUEENSTOWN TO ADMIRALTY:

  “ ‘LUSITANIA’ TORPEDOED REPORTED SINKING 10 MILES S. OF KINSALE. ALL AVAILABLE TUGS AND SMALL CRAFT BEING SENT TO HER ASSISTANCE. ABERDEEN, PEMBROKE, BUNCRANA, DEVONPORT, LIVERPOOL INFORMED.”

  LUSITANIA

  DECISIONS

  THE FIRST ATTEMPTS TO LAUNCH THE LUSITANIA’S LIFEBOATS revealed the true degree of danger now faced by the ship’s passengers and shattered the illusion of safety projected by having so many boats aboard. The list was so severe that the boats on the starboard side now hung well away from the hull, leaving a gap between the boats and the deck of 5 to 8 feet, with the sea 60 feet below. Members of the crew tried using deck chairs to span the opening, but most passengers chose to jump. Parents handed small children across. One boy took a running leap and landed in a boat feet-first.