The Lusitania Murders (28 page)
Read The Lusitania Murders Online
Authors: Max Allan Collins
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Historical, #Military, #Mystery & Detective, #Mystery Fiction, #History, #Horror, #Historical Fiction, #War & Military, #Political, #World War; 1914-1918, #World War I, #Ocean Travel, #Lusitania (Steamship)
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Sixty-eight feet by fifty-two feet.
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Lauriat—who played in the daily ship’s betting pool—was keenly interested in the ship’s progress; his approximation of her speed was correct, though he was surely unaware that at twenty knots, the
Lusitania
had hit her top speed, due to the reduced number of boilers in use.
*
In addition Captain Turner had tripled his lookouts, aware he was fast approaching dangerous waters, and needing to take a fix on his position as soon as land was sighted, to begin working out the course and speed to port at Liverpool. Because of her size, the
Lusitania
could only cross the mouth of the Mersey at high tide . . . and if he missed that, he would have to spend twelve hours steaming back and forth, a virtual target for prowling U-boats.
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In 1915, Van Dine was twenty-eight.
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McClure’s concept would eventually become the League of Nations and, decades later, the United Nations.
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Van Dine overstates: A more fair characterization would be that the
Lusitania
was primed to become an armed auxiliary cruiser.
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The mastheads rose 216 feet; the ship was 785 feet long, extending beyond the wharf into the Hudson River (which had been dredged to accommodate her). The 10-million-dollar liner had 192 furnaces, 6 turbines (68,000 accumulative horsepower), and 2 massive boilers taking up four boiler rooms. In the hull were 26,000 steel plates held by 4,000,000 rivets. The rudder alone weighed 65 tons.
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Forty-one first- and second-class passengers transferred from the
Cameronia
to the
Lusitania
; three hundred third-class passengers were forced to wait almost a week to board another ship, the
Transylvania
.
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The passenger list of the
Lusitania
included 129 children, 39 of whom were infants.
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The
Lusitania
had seven main decks, lettered A through F, highest to lowest, with the Hold Deck at the bottom. A Deck was also known as the Boat Deck; B Deck as the Promenade Deck; C Deck as the Shelter Deck; D Deck as the Upper Deck; E Deck as the Main Deck; and F Deck as the Lower Deck.
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The author’s aversion to formal evening wear relates to his disdain of traditional, imposed values, not to any preference for casual attire; Van Dine was in fact something of a clotheshorse with a fashion sense both fastidious and stylish, particularly after his mystery-writing success.
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Van Dine was separated, though not legally; his wife, Katherine (and their daughter, Beverly), were living in Los Angeles, waiting for Van Dine to “establish himself in the literary world” and send for them. He did eventually divorce Katherine.
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Crew drills on the
Lusitania
invariably alternated between the same two emergency boats, Number 13 and Number 14; lowering the boats—a tricky procedure—was not part of the drill. Hard-sided lifeboats on the ship numbered twenty-two, odd numbers hanging starboard, even hanging portside; stored in cradles underneath these conventional boats were twenty-six “collapsibles,” folding boats consisting of a shallow wooden keel with canvas sides.
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Fifty-five feet by fifty feet.
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Forty-four feet by fifty-two feet.
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The telegram read, “Submarines active off south coast of Ireland.” Thinking it might be part of a longer message that was broken up, Turner wired for details; the same message was repeated.
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The severe and steadily increasing list of the ship made safe loading and launching of the lifeboats an impossibility. Boats on the portside had swung inward, many smashed to kindling; starboard, they swung out too far to safely mount and lower.
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