Dead Wake (35 page)

B
Y NOW
, Captain Turner knew the ship would sink. He put on a life jacket but remained on the bridge, as did fellow officers and his helmsman, Hugh Johnston. In the Marconi house behind the bridge, the ship’s chief wireless man, Robert Leith, used auxiliary power to send message after message asking all ships in the vicinity to come at once.

Turner asked Johnston for
another readout of the spirit gauge.

Johnston called, “Twenty-five degrees.”

Turner said, “
My God.”

His view from the bridge was of water surging over the forecastle below. He told Johnston, “
Save yourself.” The time was about 2:25
P
.
M
.—fifteen minutes since impact.

Johnston left the bridge and found one of the ship’s thirty-five life buoys. Water had reached the starboard bridge wing. Johnston entered the sea and was washed across the deck. “I simply had to go wherever the tide took me,” he said.

Turner remained on the bridge.

U-20

SCHWIEGER’S VIEW

“I
TOOK MY POSITION AT THE PERISCOPE AGAIN
,” S
CHWIEGER
told his friend Max Valentiner. “The ship was sinking with unbelievable rapidity. There was a terrific panic on her deck. Overcrowded lifeboats, fairly torn from their positions, dropped into the water. Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks. Men and women jumped into the water and tried to swim to empty, overturned lifeboats. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. It was impossible for me to give any help. I could have saved only a handful. And then the cruiser that had passed us was not very far away and must have picked up the distress signals. She would shortly appear, I thought. The scene was too horrible to watch, and I gave orders to dive to twenty meters, and away.”

In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25
P
.
M
., Schwieger wrote: “
It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire a second torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.”

Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the
Lusitania
, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.

LUSITANIA

THE LITTLE ARMY

C
ERTAIN NOW THAT THE SHIP WOULD SINK
, C
HARLES
Lauriat went back to his cabin at the forward end of B Deck to rescue what he could of his belongings. As he moved along the corridor toward his room, he found vivid evidence of just how much the ship had listed.
The floor was canted to a degree that made it impossible to walk without also stepping on the wall. The awkward bulk of his life jacket further impeded his progress. He passed open staterooms whose portholes had once provided views of sky and horizon but now looked down onto water made dark by the shadow of the leaning hull. The only light in the corridor was a shifting, silvery glow raised by sunlight glinting off the sea from beyond the ship’s shadow. Lauriat was startled to see that many of the portholes were open.

His room was a black box. He found his matches and used these to locate his passport and other items he hoped to rescue. He grabbed his leather briefcase with the Dickens
Christmas Carol
inside but left the Thackeray drawings in his shoe case. He hurried back onto the deck, which now was close to the water.

A lifeboat containing women and children was floating just off his deck, on the starboard side, but had not yet been released from the ropes that tied it to the davits on the boat deck above. This was Boat No. 7. Someone needed to act, and soon, Lauriat realized, before the ship dragged the lifeboat under. He climbed into the
boat and placed his briefcase on the bottom, then set about trying to free the stern. The bow remained tethered. Another man, a steward, was struggling to cut it loose with a pocketknife. “
The steamer was all the time rapidly settling,” Lauriat recalled, “and to look at the tremendous smokestack hanging out over us only added to the terror of the people in the boat.”

Being this close to the hull brought home just how big the
Lusitania
truly was. Arthur Mitchell, the Raleigh Bicycle agent who had wanted to hold lifeboat drills for passengers, was in Boat No. 15, four astern of Lauriat’s. He said, “
Never could one realize the size of the ship so well as at this moment, her great deck towering above us, and her enormous funnels clear against the sky belching forth smoke which almost blinded the people in the boats around her.”

The ship was still moving but sinking fast, the deck visibly descending.
Lauriat stood on a seat in the lifeboat, intending to go forward to help with the bow. The curved arm of a descending davit struck him from behind and knocked him down. He got up, this time mindful of the davit, and moved forward by stepping from seat to seat, forcing his way through the mass of passengers.

The boat seemed to be full of oars—“an infinite number,” he wrote. He stepped on one. It rolled. He fell.

By the time Lauriat got to his feet, the now partially submerged forward davit was pressing on the bow of the lifeboat and the boat’s stern was rising. It was as though the ship had reached out with a clawed hand to drag the lifeboat down. There was nothing to be done. Lauriat stepped from the boat into the water. He urged the other occupants to do likewise, but few did. The davit gripped the lifeboat and tipped it inward, toward the deck, then pulled it under the water, with women and children and the Dickens
Carol
still aboard.

S
HIPBUILDER
S
AMUEL
K
NOX
came across Paul Crompton, the Philadelphian traveling to England with his wife and six children. Crompton had corralled four of the children and was trying to put a life jacket on the youngest, “a mere baby,” Knox said. One
of Crompton’s older girls could not get her own jacket adjusted properly. With no apparent concern, she asked Knox, “
Please will you show me how to fix this?” Knox did so. The girl thanked him.

N
ORAH
B
RETHERTON
, the Los Angeles woman who had run to rescue her infant daughter, Betty, while leaving her three-year-old son asleep in her cabin, carried the baby up a stairway crammed with passengers. She forced the girl into the arms of a passing stranger, a man, then turned and went back down to get her son.

The interior stairs were empty of people. She ran. Smoke came through the floors of the corridor and the cabin itself. She grabbed the boy, Paul, and carried him up to B Deck, to the starboard side, which by this point was canted so steeply that another woman, also holding a small boy, slid past along the deck, on her back.

Bretherton came to a lifeboat in process of being lowered. A male passenger told her she could not get in, that the boat was too full, but a friend of Bretherton’s, already in the boat, persuaded the other passengers to allow her aboard.

Bretherton had no idea where her baby was. On the way to the lifeboat, she had seen the man to whom she had given the child, but the man’s arms were empty.

T
HEODATE
P
OPE
struggled to come to the surface but found herself pressed against a barrier of some sort. Something made of wood. She swallowed salt water.

“
I opened my eyes,” she wrote, “and through the green water I could see what I was being dashed up against; it looked like the bottom and keel of one of the ship’s boats.” She was certain death was near, she wrote, and “committed myself to God’s care in thought—a prayer without words.” Then, something struck her, and she lost consciousness.

She awoke floating on the surface, held up by her life jacket. For a few moments, everything she saw was gray. The limbs of frantic people jostled her. There was screaming and shouting.

Color returned to her vision. A man, “insane with fright,” grabbed her around the shoulders. He had no life jacket. His bulk pushed her downward.

“Oh please don’t,” she said. Then she and the man sank below the surface. She passed out again.

When she regained consciousness, the man was gone and she was afloat. There was sunshine and cerulean sky. The ship was well past, and still moving. The men and women drifting in the sea around her were spaced more widely than before, and they were quieter. Some were alive, some clearly dead. Blood flowed from a gash in one man’s forehead.

An oar floated near. Her life jacket kept her buoyant, but even so she reached for the oar and draped her right foot over the blade. She raised her head to see if help was coming, but saw that none was. “Then I sank back, very relieved in my mind, for I decided it was too horrible to be true and that I was dreaming, and again lost consciousness.”

E
LSEWHERE IN THE SEA
, a kindred soul also lay adrift—Mary Popham Lobb, a British citizen and spiritualist from the island of St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. For her this time in the water was mystical and moving. She found herself drifting farther and farther from the dense mass of bodies and wreckage left behind as the ship slid by. The cries of survivors became faint, as did the clatter of oars and the shouts of men in boats.

She gave up all hope of rescue and told herself the time to cross over had come, but another voice within told her, no, this was not her moment. “
The gulls were flying overhead,” she wrote, “and I remember noticing the beauty of the blue shadows which the sea throws up to their white feathers: they were happy and alive and made me feel rather lonely; my thoughts went to my people, looking forward to seeing me, and at that moment having tea in the garden. The idea of their grief was unbearable; I had to cry a little.”

G
RACE
F
RENCH
, having jumped without a life jacket, sank deep into the sea. “
It got blacker and blacker, until it became calm and peaceful and I thought I must be in heaven,” she wrote. “The next thing I saw was the water getting lighter and lighter until I popped to the surface and grabbed hold of a plank of wood and it helped keep me afloat. With that I felt I was saved; I grabbed hold of a lifejacket which had a dead young man in it. We floated together for a while until a big wave washed him away.”

D
WIGHT
H
ARRIS
swam from the ship. “
I had no feeling of fear when I went overboard.” He felt as comfortable as if he had simply entered a swimming pool—so composed that when he came across a floating book, he picked it up and examined it.

The
Lusitania
moved past. “I was carried by the whole length of the ship and saw everything that happened!—The first life boat (starboard side) was in the water with only two sailors in it. They called to me to swim to it, but I kept on. The second boat was suspended and hanging straight down, the ropes at one end having jammed; the third and fourth boats were crowded with people.”

He saw that the sea was now level with the bridge. As the ship passed him, its stern rose into the air.

F
OR THE FAMILY
of Joseph Frankum, of Birmingham, England, traveling with his wife, three-year-old daughter, and two sons, ages five and seven, these last moments were terrifying. Frankum gathered them all in a lifeboat on the port side, at the stern. The boat still hung from its davits, but Frankum hoped it would float free when the sea arrived.

The view downhill was of chaos and death, punctuated with eruptions of black smoke as boilers exploded in succession. The mounting air pressure in the hull caused portholes to burst and seams and apertures to howl.

But, strangely, there was also singing. First “Tipperary,” then “Rule, Britannia!” Next came “Abide with Me,” but it was so moving
and so sad that women began to cry, and the singers switched to “Pull for the Shore,” and then another round of “Rule, Britannia!”

Frankum said, “
I clung to my wife and children and held them tight.”

M
ARGARET
M
ACKWORTH
stayed with the ship, on the boat deck, next to Dorothy Conner. Conner’s brother-in-law was somewhere below, looking for life jackets. A strange calm settled over the deck. People moved “
gently and vaguely,” Mackworth recalled. “They reminded one of a swarm of bees who do not know where the queen has gone.”

For a moment, the ship seemed about to right itself. Word spread that the crew had at last been able to close its watertight bulkheads and that the danger of sinking was past. Mackworth and Conner shook hands. “
Well, you’ve had your thrill all right,” Mackworth said.

“I never want another,” Conner said.

Conner’s brother-in-law returned. He had been unable to reach his cabin because of water in the corridor but had managed to find jackets elsewhere. The three put them on. Mackworth released the hook on her skirt, to make it easier to take off later if the need arose.

The ship’s list returned, steeper than before. Seventeen minutes had elapsed since impact. They resolved to jump. The idea terrified Mackworth. She chided herself on this, “telling myself how ridiculous I was to have physical fear of the jump when we stood in such grave danger as we did.”