Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Time zones and sluggish communication made it even harder on friends and kin. Those who could afford the cost sent cables to Cunard with detailed descriptions of their loved ones, down to the serial numbers stamped on their watches, but these cables took hours to receive, transcribe, and deliver. In those first days after the disaster, thousands of cables flooded Cunard’s offices. Cunard had little information to provide.

  The dead collected at Queenstown were placed in three makeshift morgues, including Town Hall, where they were placed side by side on the floor. Whenever possible, children were placed beside their mothers. Survivors moved in slow, sad lines looking for lost kin.

  There were reunions of a happier sort as well.

  Seaman Leslie Morton spent Friday night looking for his brother Cliff on the lists of survivors and in the hotels of Queenstown but found no trace. Early the next morning he sent a telegram to his father, “Am saved, looking for Cliff.” He went to one of the morgues. “Laid out in rows all the way down on both sides were sheeted and shrouded bodies,” he wrote, “and a large number of people in varying states of sorrow and distress were going from body to body, turning back the sheets to see if they could identify loved ones who had not yet been found.”

  He worked his way along, lifting sheets. Just as he was about to pull yet one more, he saw the hand of another searcher reaching for the same sheet. He looked over, and saw his brother. Their reaction was deadpan.

  “Hallo, Cliff, glad to see you,” Leslie said.

  “Am I glad to see you too, Gert,” Cliff said. “I think we ought to have a drink on this!”

  As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, “so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.”

  That night Leslie had his first-ever Guinness. “I cannot say that I thought much of it in those days, but it seemed a good thing in which to celebrate being alive, having got together again and being in Ireland.”

  THE RESCUE SHIPS brought in many of the bodies, but many others were recovered from the coves and beaches of Ireland, as the sea brought them ashore. One man’s body was found on a beach clutching a foot-long fragment of a lifeboat, which later would find its way into the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the wood still bearing the brand Lusitania.

  Consul Frost took responsibility for managing the American dead. The “important” bodies, meaning those in first class, were embalmed at U.S. expense. “There was a curious effacement of social or mental distinction by death, and we often believed a corpse to be important when it turned out to be decidedly the opposite,” Frost wrote. “The commonest expression was one of reassured tranquillity, yet with an undertone of puzzlement or aggrievement as though some trusted friend had played a practical joke which the victim did not yet understand.” The unimportant bodies were sealed inside lead coffins, “so that they could be returned to America whenever desired.”

  Cunard went to great lengths to number, photograph, and catalog the recovered bodies. Body No. 1 was that of Catherine Gill, a forty-year-old widow; Body No. 91 was that of chief purser McCubbin, for whom this was to be the last voyage before retirement. Nearly all the dead were photographed in coffins, though one lies in what appears to be a large wheelbarrow, and a toddler rests on a makeshift platform. They still wear their coats, suits, dresses, and jewelry. A mother and tiny daughter, presumably found together, share a coffin. The mother is turned toward her daughter; the child lies with one arm resting across her mother’s chest. They look as though they could step from this coffin and resume their lives. Others convey the same restful aspect. A handsome clean-shaven man in his thirties, Body No. 59, lies dressed neatly in white shirt, tweed jacket, polka-dotted bow tie, and dark overcoat. The textures are comforting; the buttons on his overcoat are shiny, like new.

  These photographs beg viewers to imagine last moments. Here is Body No. 165, a girl in a white dress with a lacy top. Hair flung back, mouth open as if in a scream, her whole aspect is one of fear and pain. One victim, identified only as Body No. 109, is that of a stout woman who lies naked under a rough blanket, her hair still flecked with sand. Unlike all the other bodies in this collection of photographs, her eyes are squeezed tightly shut. Her cheeks are puffed, her lips are tightly clamped. She looks uncannily as if she were still holding her breath.

  The most unsettling image here is that of Body No. 156, a girl of about three, slightly chubby, with curly blond hair, wearing a pullover sweater with overlong sleeves. What is troubling is the child’s expression. She looks perturbed. Someone laid flowers across her chest and at her side. But she seems unmollified. She lies on a wood pallet, beside what appears to be a life jacket. Her expression is one of pure fury.

  Consul Frost found the sight of so many drowned children difficult to expunge from his thoughts. He had a young daughter of his own. “Several weeks after the disaster, one night out at my home, I went into a bedroom with a lighted match and came unexpectedly upon the sleeping form of my own little daughter,” he wrote. For an instant, his mind was jolted back to scenes he had witnessed in the morgues. “I give you my word I recoiled as though I had found a serpent.”

  THE SEARCH for bodies still adrift in the sea continued until June, when Cunard suggested to Frost that the time had come to halt the effort. He concurred. The search was suspended on June 4, but bodies continued to wash ashore well into the summer. The later a body was recovered, the higher its assigned number, the worse its condition. Two men came ashore in County Kerry on July 14 and 15, some 200 miles, by sea, from the wreck. One wore a cleric’s clothing and had “perfect teeth,” according to a report on the find, which noted, “Much of the body was eaten away.” The second had no head, arms, or feet, but, like some tentacled sea creature, dragged behind him a full complement of clothing—blue serge trousers, black-and-white-striped flannel shirt, woolen undershirt, undershorts, suspenders, a belt, and a keychain with seven keys. To encourage reporting of new arrivals, Cunard offered a one-pound reward. Frost offered an additional pound to anyone who recovered a corpse that was demonstrably a U.S. citizen.

  On July 11, 1915, one American did come ashore, at Stradbally, Ireland. At first authorities believed him to be a Lusitania victim and designated him Body No. 248. He had not been a passenger, however. His name was Leon C. Thrasher, the American who had gone missing on March 28 when the SS Falaba was torpedoed and sunk. He had been in the water 106 days.

  The people who discovered remains treated them with great respect, despite their often grotesque condition. Such was the case when the body of a middle-aged man was found on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula on July 17, seventy-one days after the disaster. The currents and winds had taken him on a long journey around the southwest rim of Ireland before depositing him at Brandon Bay, a distance of about 250 miles from Queenstown. His body was discovered by a local citizen, who notified the Royal Irish Constabulary in Castlegregory, 6 miles to the east. A sergeant, J. Regan, promptly set out by bicycle, accompanied by a constable, and soon arrived at the scene, an austere but lovely beach. Here they found what little remained of an apparently male corpse. That the man had come from the Lusitania was obvious. Part of a life jacket was still attached to the body, and another portion lay nearby, marked Lusitania.

  There was little question as to his identity. When the officers went through what remained of the man’s clothing, they found a watch, with the initials V.O.E.S. stamped on its case, and a knife marked “Victor E. Shields,” and a letter addressed to “Mr. Victor Shields, care of steamer Lusitania.” The letter was dated April 30, 1915, the day before the ship left New York. In one pocket the officers discovered a copy of an entertainment program from the ship. The documents were soaked. The officers laid them in the sun to dry.

  Sergeant Regan noted that the tide was rising quickly, “so I sent for a sh
eet and placed the body on it and carried it from the tide to a place of safety.” He then cycled to a telegraph office and wired the local coroner, who replied that no inquest would be necessary. The police ordered a lead casket and wooden shell, and by evening Shields was placed in a “Swansdown” robe and coffined within. The undertaker took the coffin to a private home, where it remained until the next day, when police buried it in a nearby graveyard. “Everything was done that could be done by the Police,” Sergeant Regan wrote in a letter to Consul Frost, “in fact they could do no more for a member of their family, and I on behalf of the Police tender Mrs. Shields our sincere sympathy in her bereavement.”

  For disbelieving families, struck by grief, it was important to know precisely how their loved ones had died, whether by drowning, exposure, or physical trauma. The Shields family took this to extremes and ordered the body disinterred. The family wanted an autopsy. This was easier asked than achieved. “Needless to say,” wrote Frost, “it proved virtually impossible to procure a physician of advanced years and high standing to dissect remains seventy-five days after decease.” Frost did manage to find two younger doctors who were willing to take on the task. The character of this endeavor was made clear in the report of one of the physicians, Dr. John Higgins, acting house surgeon of Cork’s North Infirmary.

  The autopsy began at 2:30, July 23, at the office of an undertaker; the second doctor was to perform his own autopsy the next day. A plumber now opened the lead casket in which Victor Shields lay, and soon the scent of heated lead was joined by another sort of odor. Consul Frost was present for this, but Higgins noted that at a point about halfway through the autopsy he left, “when he was called away.”

  In life, by Higgins’s estimate, Shields had weighed 14 or 15 stone, or roughly 200 pounds. His body was now in “an advanced state of decomposition,” Higgins noted. This was an understatement. “The soft parts of his face and head were entirely absent, including the scalp,” Higgins wrote. “The majority of the teeth were missing, including all the front teeth. The hands were also absent, and the soft parts of the upper right arm. The back of the calf of the right leg was largely absent, as was a portion of the left calf. The genitals were very much decomposed, virtually missing.”

  Mr. Shields lay there smiling up at them, but not in an endearing fashion. “I examined the skull,” Dr. Higgins wrote. “Externally it was totally bare as far as the lower part of the occipital bone.” The occipital forms the bottom rear portion of the skull. “I removed the skull-cap; and found that the brain was too much decomposed for examination, but the membranes were intact.” He removed the brain and examined the interior of the skull. He found no evidence of fracture at its base or to the cervical canal. This ruled out death by falling debris or other blunt trauma to the head. Nor did he discover any fractures along the spine, or injury to the back. Shields’s internal organs likewise failed to reveal what killed him, but they did provide Dr. Higgins with a look at what remained of the man’s last lunch aboard the Lusitania. “The stomach contained roughly a pint of a green semi-solid mass, apparently semi-digested food, but contained no water as such.”

  The lack of a clear cause of death was perplexing. “In my opinion,” Higgins wrote, “there is no injury present which would account for death. There is no evidence of drowning; and the probability is that death was brought about as a result of shock or exposure, probably the former. From the contents of the stomach it would appear that death supervened within a very few hours after his last meal, possibly from two to three hours.”

  After all that, the finding was death with no obvious cause. The other physician reached the same conclusion.

  The peripatetic Mr. Shields was returned to his coffin and shipped to America. Consul Frost, in a letter to Washington, praised the effort taken by the police after the discovery of Shields’s body. “It would be a most graceful and commendable act if the estate of Mr. Shields should forward from two to five pounds to the sergeant and his colleagues for the excellent spirit in which they discharged their duties.”

  The mystery as to what killed Shields remained, leaving the family to wonder what horror he had endured. This same fate fell to nearly all the kin of the dead. There can be no doubt that for many passengers death came suddenly and utterly by surprise. The dozens of crewmen who were in the luggage bay at the time of impact were killed instantly by the force of the torpedo blast, but exactly how many and who they were was not known. Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil’s comedy.

  One can only imagine the final minutes of the Crompton parents and their children. How do you save a child, let alone six children, especially when one of them is an infant and one is six years old? None of the Cromptons survived. Five of the children were never found. The infant, Master Peter Romilly Crompton, about nine months old, was Body No. 214.

  Cunard chairman Booth knew the family well. “My own personal loss is very great,” he wrote, in a May 8 letter to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner. “We are all at one in our feelings with regard to this terrible disaster to the ‘Lusitania,’ and it is quite hopeless to try to put anything in writing.” Sumner wrote back that the loss of the ship and so many passengers “is sad beyond expression.”

  THE MANY unidentified bodies in the three morgues presented Cunard officials with an awkward predicament, and one that needed to be addressed quickly. The bodies—some 140 of them—had begun to decompose, at a rate quickened by the warm spring weather. The company decided on a mass burial. Each body would have its own coffin; mothers and babies would share; but all would be interred together in three separate excavations, lettered A, B, and C, in the Old Church Cemetery on a hillside outside Queenstown.

  The date was set for Monday, May 10. All the previous day and throughout the night, soldiers dug the graves and undertakers coffined the bodies, leaving the lids off as long as possible to encourage last-minute identifications. Owing to a shortage of vehicles, the coffins were transported in shifts beginning early Monday morning, but three coffins were held back for the actual funeral procession, which was to begin in the afternoon.

  Trains brought mourners and the curious. Shops closed for the day and pulled their blinds and fastened their shutters. Ship captains ordered flags hung at half-mast. As the procession advanced through Queenstown, a military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” Clerics led the cortege, among them Father Cowley Clark of London, himself a survivor of the disaster. Soldiers and mourners followed. U.S. consul Frost walked as well. Soldiers and citizens lined the entire route, standing bareheaded as a measure of respect. The road they followed passed through hills of vivid green stippled with wildflowers and slashed here and there by the garish yellow of blooming gorse. The sky was clear and without cloud, and in the distant harbor boats dipped and nodded in a light breeze, “a picture of peace,” wrote one reporter, “that gave no hint of the recent tragedy.”

  The procession bearing the three coffins arrived at the cemetery about three o’clock and stopped at the edge of the graves. The many other coffins, each an elongated diamond of elm, had been laid neatly within, arranged in two tiers, the body numbers and locations carefully mapped so that if the photographs and lists of personal effects cataloged by Cunard led to subsequent identifications, the families would at least know the exact whereabouts of their loved ones.

  As the three coffins were lowered into the graves, the crowd sang “Abide with Me.” Gunfire followed, from a ceremonial guard, and a squad of buglers played “The Last Post,” the British military’s equivalent of taps. Soldiers converged and began filling the graves. A photograph shows a line of small boys standing on the hillock of excavated soil, watching with avid interest as the soldiers below fill the crevices b
etween coffins.

  It was lovely, and dignified, and deeply moving, but this mass burial imposed a psychic cost on kin who learned, belatedly, that their own loved ones were interred within. Cunard’s final count found that of these anonymous dead, about half were later identified using personal effects and photographs. For some families the idea of their kin resting alone in that far-off terrain was too hard to bear. The family of Elizabeth A. Seccombe, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Petersborough, New Hampshire, pleaded with Consul Frost for help in retrieving her and bringing her home. She was the daughter of a Cunard captain who had died some years earlier. Her body was No. 164, buried on May 14 in grave B, sixth row, upper tier.

  Frost did what he could. He argued that Seccombe’s location in the grave made her coffin particularly easy to locate. Though very much a miser when it came to U.S. funds, he went so far as to offer £100 to cover costs.

  The British government was willing, but the local council said no, and its decision held sway. In part, the council was influenced by local superstition—“religious prejudice,” Frost called it—but mainly it did not want to set a precedent. At least twenty other families had sought to disinter their loved ones and had been refused. The council’s stance, Frost wrote, “is incomprehensible to me.”