Dead Wake (39 page)

It was a strange moment for a sea captain. Twenty minutes earlier
Turner had stood on the bridge in command of one of the greatest ocean liners ever known. Now, still in uniform, he floated in the place where his ship had been, in a calm sea under a brilliant blue sky, no deck, cabin, or hull in sight, not even the ship’s tall masts.

He and Pierpoint swam together. Turner saw the bodies of some of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets—he counted forty in all. Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement
he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”

Turner spent three hours in the water, until he was pulled aboard a lifeboat, and later was transferred to a fishing trawler, the
Bluebell
.

M
ARGARET
M
ACKWORTH
’
S
first recollection, after having lost consciousness in the sea, was of awakening on the
Bluebell
’s deck, naked under a blanket, her teeth chattering, she wrote, “like castanets.”

A sailor appeared above her, and said, “
That’s better.”

She was miffed. “I had a vague idea that something had happened but I thought that I was still on the deck of the
Lusitania
, and I was vaguely annoyed that some unknown sailor should be attending to me instead of my own stewardess.”

Her confusion cleared; the sailor brought her tea. With somewhat less chivalry, he told her, “We left you up here to begin with as we thought you were dead, and it did not seem worth while cumbering up the cabin with you.”

The sailor and two others helped her below decks, where she found an unexpected giddiness. “The warmth below was delicious,” she wrote; “it seemed to make one almost delirious.” Everyone around her seemed “a little drunk with the heat and the
light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive. We were talking at the tops of our voices and laughing a great deal.”

She recognized the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive or not. Another survivor in the cabin believed her own husband to be dead. “It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking up of her whole life,” Mackworth wrote, “yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.”

Captain Turner did not share in the gaiety. He sat quietly by himself, in his sodden uniform.

As Mackworth watched, a woman approached Turner and began telling him about the loss of her child. Her voice was low, almost a monotone. She had placed the boy on a raft, she said. The raft then capsized, and her son was gone. In the same dispassionate manner, she told Turner that her son’s death had been unnecessary—that it was caused by the lack of organization and discipline among the crew.

T
HE RESCUE SHIPS
reached Queenstown long after dark. The
Flying Fish
with Charles Lauriat aboard arrived at 9:15, the
Bluebell
at 11:00. The wharf was lit by gas torches that turned the evening mist a pale amber. Soldiers, sailors, and townspeople formed two lines that extended from the gangway into town.
They applauded as survivors came ashore. Other soldiers waited in groups of four, with stretchers.
Charles Lauriat carried one man on his back—the man with the broken leg, to whom he had spoken so rudely. The man proved to be Leonard McMurray, and this was his second shipwreck. He had survived the 1909 sinking of the White Star Line’s
Republic
, after a collision in fog with another liner.

Lauriat’s Thackeray drawings and the Dickens
Christmas Carol
were somewhere deep in the Irish Sea. He sent his wife a telegram. “
I saved the baby’s pictures,” he wrote. “They were my mascot.”

He closed: “I regret your hours of suspense.”

Margaret Mackworth learned upon docking that her father
was alive. She was dressed only in a blanket and asked the
Bluebell
’s captain for safety pins, but the idea of pins aboard a ship like his made him laugh out loud. A soldier gave her his coat, a “British Warm”; the captain gave her his slippers. She tucked the blanket around her waist to form a makeshift skirt.

She found her father waiting at the end of the gangplank. The relief and joy she felt reminded her of that time a month earlier when she had arrived in New York and seen him on the dock. As one of the first survivors to reach Queenstown, he had waited for hours as boat after boat came in, none carrying his daughter. With each successive arrival, the number of dead on board seemed to increase relative to the number of living souls. A friend said later that for a long time after this the father’s face had seemed like that of an elderly man.

Dorothy Conner, the spunky young American who had sat at Mackworth’s table and had wanted a “thrill,” came to see her the next morning, Saturday. Conner seemed unruffled, Mackworth recalled. “
She was still dressed in the neat fawn tweed coat and skirt which she had had on when I saw her step off the deck the day before, and it looked as smart and well tailored as if it had just come out of the shop.”

Dwight Harris landed with his engagement ring and other jewelry still hung around his neck, and his money in his pocket. That night he found a shop that had stayed open for survivors and bought an undershirt, socks, slippers, and pajamas. He found a room in a hotel, which he shared with six other men, “
and took a huge dose of whiskey before going to bed.” On Saturday morning he bought himself a suit, shirt, collar, raincoat, and cap. While doing so he happened to notice a boy of about eighteen who was asking the shopkeeper if he could have some clothes, even though he had no money to pay for them. The boy looked bereft. Harris volunteered to pay. He learned that the boy had lost his mother. “Poor fellow!” Harris wrote to his own mother. “I
thank God you
weren’t with me!!!”

When Theodate Pope’s ship, the
Julia
, arrived, a doctor was summoned to come aboard to examine her. Assisted by two soldiers,
the doctor helped her down to the wharf and into a motorcar, then accompanied her to a hotel. As she stepped from the car, she collapsed onto the sidewalk. The doctor helped her inside. “
I was left on a lounge in a room full of men in all sorts of strange garments while the proprietress hurried to bring me brandy,” she wrote. One of the men was the English passenger who at lunch that day had joked about not getting torpedoed before having his ice cream. He was wearing a dressing gown. Pink.

Theodate drank brandy and was helped to a room. Her face was swollen and discolored.
She arranged to send her mother a telegram, one word: “Saved.”

She tried to sleep. “
All night I kept expecting Mr. Friend to appear, looking for me,” she wrote. “All night long men kept coming into our rooms, snapping on the lights, bringing children for us to identify, taking telegrams, getting our names for the list of survivors, etc., etc.”

But Mr. Friend never did appear, nor did Theodate’s maid, Miss Robinson.

T
URNER WALKED
ashore wrapped in a blanket. He spent the night at the home of a local banker. The next morning, in his uniform, he went for a walk. He had lost his Cunard hat and stopped at a haberdasher’s shop to buy something to replace it. A survivor named Beatrice Williams, who had also been aboard the
Bluebell
, saw him and bristled. “
You should be worrying about a hat when so many of us have lost everything we own. Why—you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

A correspondent for the
New York World
also encountered Turner that morning and conducted a brief interview. In a cable to his editor, the reporter wrote that the captain “
appeared stunned.”

The reporter informed Turner that the bodies of a number of Americans had been recovered, including that of Broadway producer Charles Frohman, with whom Turner had spoken on the morning of the ship’s departure. Upon hearing this, Turner seemed to struggle to control his emotions.
Tears filled his eyes.

O
F THE
L
USITANIA
’
S
1,959
PASSENGERS AND CREW
, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans.

Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for one reason or another had ended up on the
Lusitania
, as was the case with the passengers of the
Cameronia
transferred to the ship at the last minute. The transfers included passengers Margaret and James Shineman, newlyweds from Oil City, Wyoming, who suddenly found themselves aboard the fastest, most luxurious ship in service, for their journey to Scotland to visit Margaret’s family. The visit was to be a surprise. Both were killed. Of the forty-two passengers and crew transferred, only thirteen survived, among them Miss Grace French, who breezed through the whole ordeal with aplomb.

There was the usual confusion that follows disasters.
For days dozens of cables shot back and forth between Cunard offices in
Liverpool, Queenstown, and New York. These conveyed a sense of both urgency and surprise, as though Cunard had never expected to lose one of its great ships and to actually have to use its passenger records to tally the living and dead.

A few passengers reported to be dead were in fact alive, but more often those reported alive were dead. “Report of Mr. Bilicke as survivor is erroneous,” U.S. consul Frost wrote in a terse telegram to Ambassador Page in London. A five-year-old boy, Dean Winston Hodges, was at first said to be safe, but then came a cable from Cunard to its New York office, “Regret no trace of Master Dean Winston Hodges.” His body proved to be among those taken aboard the rescue ship
Flying Fish
. Names of the dead were misspelled, offering moments of false hope. A man identified as Fred Tyn was in fact Fred Tyers, who had died; Teresa Desley was in fact Teresa Feeley, who perished along with her husband, James. There were two Mrs. Hammonds. One lived; the other—Ogden’s wife—died. Two waiters were named John Leach. One survived, the other did not. A dead passenger named Greenfield was in fact Greenshields.

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.”