by Erik Larson
Turner had no concern about the German warning. Shortly before departure, he was standing on the ship’s promenade deck, talking with Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman, when one of the ship-news men—apparently not Jack Lawrence—approached and asked Vanderbilt if he thought he’d be as lucky this time as he had been in deciding not to sail on the Titanic. Vanderbilt smiled but said nothing.
Turner put his hand on Vanderbilt’s shoulder and said to the reporter, “Do you think all these people would be booking passage on board the Lusitania if they thought she could be caught by a German submarine? Why it’s the best joke I’ve heard in many days, this talk of torpedoing the Lusitania.”
Both Vanderbilt and Turner laughed.
ANOTHER DELAY occurred, but for this one Captain Turner was at least partly responsible. His niece, the actress Mercedes Desmore, had come aboard for a quick tour and was nearly stranded when the crew, having boarded all the extra Cameronia passengers, removed the gangway. Turner angrily ordered it replaced so that his niece could get off. The process further postponed the ship’s departure.
One passenger, set designer Oliver Bernard, took note. “Captain Turner,” he wrote, later, “neglected his duty at the wharf in New York at a time when the vessel should have been sailing—by having a relative on board.” By the time Bernard made this charge, he had come to understand what few others seemed to grasp, which was that on this particular voyage, given the convergence of disparate forces, timing was everything. Even the briefest delay could shape history.
THE MEN operating the motion-picture camera outside the Cunard terminal moved it to a higher prospect, apparently the building’s roof, until the camera was at about the height of the ship’s bridge, with its lens aimed downward to capture scenes on the decks below. In the film, passengers crowd the starboard side, many waving white handkerchiefs the size of cloth diapers. One man flourishes an American flag, while nearby a woman props her baby on a deck rail.
A few moments later, a young sailor climbs a stairway to the docking bridge, an elevated, narrow platform spanning the deck near the ship’s stern. He raises a white flag on a pole on the port side, then sprints across to raise a duplicate flag on the starboard side, a visual signal that departure is imminent. Soon afterward, just past noon, the Lusitania begins to ease backward. The camera remains stationary, but the slow, smooth motion of the ship produces the illusion that it is the camera that is moving, panning across the ship’s full length.
A crewman standing atop a lifeboat works on its ropes. A first-cabin steward steps smartly out of a doorway and walks directly to a male passenger, as if delivering a message. At the top of a stairway, staring directly at the camera, is a man the filmmakers instantly recognize, Elbert Hubbard, in his Stetson, though his cravat is barely visible under the buttoned front of his overcoat.
The ship’s bridge now passes by, at camera level, and there is Turner, in frame 289. He stands at the starboard end of the bridge wing. As the ship slides past the camera, the captain, smiling, turns toward the lens and removes his hat, once, in a brief wave, then leans comfortably against the rail.
Once the ship has backed fully into the Hudson, two tugboats gingerly nudge its bow toward the south, downstream, and the ship begins to move under its own power. As the Lusitania at last exits the frame, the wharves of Hoboken become visible in the distance, heavily hazed with smoke and mist.
The film ends.
WHILE MOVING downriver Turner kept his speed slow, as freighters, lighters, tugs, and ferries of all sizes adjusted their own courses to make way. The Hudson here was busy. A 1909 sea chart shows the shore of Manhattan so closely packed with piers as to evoke a piano keyboard. The river was also surprisingly shallow, just deep enough to accept the Lusitania’s nearly 36-foot draft. Turner’s crew had balanced the vessel so well that at the time of departure the draft at the bow, as indicated by markings on the hull, was just 4 inches deeper than at the stern.
The river was lined on both sides with piers and terminals; on the New Jersey flank—the right side as the ship moved down the river—lay the vast track-covered wharves of various railroads, among them the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the New Jersey Central. On the left was a succession of piers, bearing, in order of descent down the Hudson, names that spoke to the ubiquity of sea travel:
South Pacific Co.
Colonial Line
Albany Line
Clyde Line
Savannah Line
People’s Line
Old Dominion Line
Ben Franklin Line
Fall River Line
Providence Line
Here too were the many ferries that carried goods and people between New Jersey and the city, with terminals at Desbrosses, Chambers, Barclay, Cortland, and Liberty Streets. The ferry to the Statue of Liberty operated from the southernmost tip of Manhattan.
As the Lusitania made its way through the harbor, signs of the war became evident. The ship passed one of Germany’s crack liners, the giant Vaterland, tied to a Hoboken wharf. Over 60 percent larger in gross tonnage than the Lusitania, the Vaterland had once held the Blue Riband, but on the first day of the war the ship had ducked for safety into New York Harbor, to avoid being captured and put to use by the British navy, a very real possibility, as the passengers of the Lusitania soon would discover. The Vaterland and its crew had been effectively interned in New York ever since. At least seventeen other German liners were likewise stranded.
Below the Battery, where the Hudson and East Rivers met to form New York Bay, the waters grew deeper and more spacious. Here Turner encountered familiar landmarks. To the right, Ellis Island and next, of course, Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island; on his left, Governors Island with its circular fortress-prison, Castle Williams, followed by Red Hook in Brooklyn and the breakwater of the Erie Basin. In the distance sprawled the Black Tom wharves, a vast munitions depot, which before the war’s end would be destroyed in an apparent act of sabotage. Ever mindful of traffic, Turner maintained a slow speed, especially in the Narrows, which were always clogged with ocean liners and freighters, and perilous in fog. Bells peeled in the haze as random wakes tipped buoys, evoking the sounds of churches on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, the Lusitania’s purser and stewards conducted their usual inspection to detect stowaways. This being wartime, they did so with extra care and soon had three men in custody. The men appeared to speak only German; one carried a camera.
The discovery was reported to Staff Captain Anderson. He in turn requested the assistance of Pierpoint, the Liverpool detective, and called as well for the ship’s interpreter. They learned little, other than that the three men were indeed German. What the stowaways intended to accomplish was unclear, but later speculation held that they hoped to find and photograph evidence that the ship was armed or carried contraband munitions.
The three were locked below decks in a makeshift brig, pending arrival in Liverpool, at which point they were to be turned over to British authorities. News of the arrests was kept from the passengers.
ALTA PIPER, the daughter of the famous medium, never made it aboard; neither did she refund her ticket. Unable to ignore the night’s voices, but also apparently unable to step forth and just cancel, she chose the path taken by indecisive people throughout history and spent the morning of departure packing and repacking her bags, over and over, letting the clock run out, until at last she heard the distant horn marking the ship’s departure.
U-20
TOWARD FAIR ISLE
AT DAWN, SATURDAY, ABOARD U-20, THERE WAS COFFEE, bread, marmalade, cocoa. The boat’s ventilators issued a monotonous buzz. Schwieger, atop the conning tower, noted that the sea was calm, “here and there rain and fog.” A steamship appeared up ahead but was so obscured by mist and gray that he chose not to attack. Members of the crew took turns smoking on deck, a pastime forbidden within the boat itself.
The fog grew dense, so much so that at 7:15 A.M. Schwieger ordered a dive to U-20’s customa
ry cruising depth, 72 feet. The depth was great enough to ensure that U-20 would pass underneath vessels of even the deepest draft. This was prudent practice, for U-boats, despite their fearsome reputation, were fragile vessels, complex and primitive at the same time.
Men served as ballast. In order to quickly level or “dress” his boat, or speed a dive, Schwieger would order crewmen to run to the bow or the stern. The chaos might at first seem funny, like something from one of the new Keystone Cops films, except for the fact that these maneuvers were executed typically at moments of peril. U-boats were so sensitive to changes in load that the mere launch of a torpedo required men to shift location to compensate for the sudden loss of weight.
The boats were prone to accident. They were packed with complicated mechanical systems for steering, diving, ascending, and regulating pressure. Amid all this were wedged torpedoes, grenades, and artillery shells. Along the bottom of the hull lay the boat’s array of batteries, filled with sulfuric acid, which upon contact with seawater produced deadly chlorine gas. In this environment, simple errors could, and did, lead to catastrophe.
One boat, U-3, sank on its maiden voyage. When it was about two miles from the naval yard, its captain ordered a trial dive. Everything seemed fine, until the deck of the U-boat passed below the surface and water began pouring into the boat through a pipe used for ventilation.
The boat sank by the stern. The captain ordered all the crew, twenty-nine men, into the bow; he and two other men stayed in the conning tower. As the crew squeezed forward, water filled the boat behind them, causing air pressure to build to painful levels. All this occurred in absolute darkness.
The batteries began generating chlorine gas, which rose in a greenish mist. Some gas entered the bow compartment, but the boat’s air purification system kept it from reaching deadly concentrations. The air supply dwindled.
On shore, naval officials did not learn of the crisis for two hours and then dispatched two floating cranes and a salvage ship, the Vulcan. The rescuers devised a plan to raise the bow to the surface so that the men within could climb out through the two forward torpedo tubes.
It took eleven hours for divers to place the necessary cables around the bow. The cranes began lifting the boat. The bow became visible.
The cables broke.
The boat fell backward into the sea. The divers tried again. This attempt took fourteen more hours. By then the twenty-nine crewmen had been sitting crammed into the bow in nearly airless darkness for more than twenty-seven hours. But this attempt worked. The men emerged through the tubes, tired and gasping for air, but alive.
The conning tower containing the captain and the two other men remained underwater. Five more hours passed before the Vulcan at last managed to bring the entire boat to the surface. When the rescuers opened the conning-tower hatch, they found its interior to be nearly dry, but the three men within were dead. Chlorine gas had seeped upward into the tower through speaking tubes designed to allow officers to communicate with the control room below.
A subsequent investigation found that the indicator governing the ventilation valve through which the water entered the boat had been installed incorrectly. It showed the valve was closed when in fact it was open.
This outcome, though, was still better than what befell a training U-boat that sank with all aboard and could not be raised for four months. Divers who participated in an early, failed attempt at rescue heard tapping from within. When the boat was finally raised, the cause of the disaster was obvious. It had struck a mine. As to what had occurred within, a seaman present when the hatch was forced open found vivid evidence of the kind of death submariners most feared. He wrote, “The scratches on the steel walls, the corpses’ torn finger-nails, the blood-stains on their clothes and on the walls, bore all too dreadful witness.”
THE FOG remained dense until about eleven o’clock Saturday morning, when Schwieger gauged visibility to be good enough to allow him to surface and continue under diesel power. It was always important to recharge the batteries, in case of a chance encounter with a destroyer or the sudden appearance of a choice target.
Soon after surfacing, Schwieger’s wireless man attempted to communicate with the Ancona, back at U-20’s base in Germany. There was no response. The wireless man reported, however, that he had picked up “strong enemy wireless activity” nearby, at 500 meters. Schwieger told him to stop signaling, to avoid revealing the boat’s presence.
U-20 continued north, well off the eastern coast of England, following a course that would take it over the top of Scotland, then south along Scotland’s west coast. From there Schwieger would make his way farther south to Ireland and sail down Ireland’s west coast, then turn left to enter the Celtic and Irish Seas between Ireland and England and proceed to his destination, Liverpool Bay. This route was far longer, certainly, than traveling through the English Channel but also much safer.
The boat moved through 4-foot swells, against winds that now came from the northeast. Schwieger’s lookouts watched for other ships, but in such gray and dreary conditions it was hard to spot the plumes of smoke exhausted by steamers.
Visibility remained poor throughout the day, and in late afternoon again worsened, until Schwieger once more found himself enclosed in fog. By this time, U-20 was crossing the sea-lanes off Edinburgh, Scotland, that funneled into the Firth of Forth. On a sunny day, with so many ships coming and going, the possibility of finding a target in these waters would have been high; but now, in the fog, attack was impossible and the risk of collision great. At four o’clock he ordered the boat to submerge and descend again to cruising depth.
That night the skies cleared, and stars arced from horizon to horizon. U-20 surfaced and Schwieger set a course toward Fair Isle, in the Shetland Islands, astride the imaginary line that divided the North Sea and the North Atlantic.
Two days out, and no longer able to communicate with his superiors, Schwieger was now wholly on his own.
LUSITANIA
RENDEZVOUS
ONCE OUTSIDE NEW YORK HARBOR, THE LUSITANIA accelerated, but Captain Turner did not yet order its cruising speed. He first had a rendezvous to make, after the ship exited American territorial waters, and it was pointless to waste the coal necessary to reach top speed when he soon would have to bring the ship to a complete stop.
The ship’s decks grew markedly cooler, subject now to the winds of the open Atlantic and the breeze generated by the ship’s own forward motion. Some passengers still lingered at the rails to watch the coastline recede, but most went inside to settle into their accommodations and unpack their belongings. Older children roamed the decks, making friends and testing out various means of recreation, including, yes, shuffleboard on the top deck. Younger children—at least those in first and second class—met the stewardesses who would tend to them during the voyage and occupy them while their parents dined in their respective dining rooms.
Theodate Pope, the architect-spiritualist, and her companion, Edwin Friend, went to the ship’s first-class reading and writing room, part of which was reserved for women, but which also served as the ship’s library, to which men also had access. It was a large but comfortable place that spanned the width of A Deck, the ship’s topmost level, and was fitted with writing desks and chairs. Its walls were covered with pale silk in soft gray and cream. Silk curtains in a pinkish hue called Rose du Barry hung at its windows. The carpet was a soft rose. Men had exclusive use of a separate similarly sized chamber farther back on A Deck, called the Smoking Room, paneled in walnut.
Theodate found a copy of that morning’s Sun, a New York newspaper, and began to read.
The paper devoted a good deal of attention to a visit that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had made to New York the previous day. He had taken time off from foreign concerns to speak at a rally at Carnegie Hall, in support of a campaign by evangelist Billy Sunday to persuade people to renounce alcohol, and to sign a pledge of “total abstinence.” For a previous talk on the sub
ject, in Philadelphia, Secretary Bryan had drawn an overflow crowd of 16,000 people. The organizers in New York expected a similar crush at the hall. It didn’t happen. Only about 2,500 people showed up, leaving about a third of the house empty. Bryan wore a black suit, a black alpaca coat, and his black string tie. At the end of his talk, toasting the audience, he raised a glass—of ice water. Booker T. Washington, newly turned fifty-nine, got up to speak as well and signed one of Billy Sunday’s pledge cards.
Another item, this out of Washington, reported President Wilson’s unhappiness at the fact that critics continued to take him to task for allowing the film The Clansman, by D. W. Griffith, to be screened at the White House. It was May now; the screening had taken place on February 18, with Wilson, his daughters, and members of the cabinet in attendance. Based on the novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, which was subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the film described the purported evils of the Reconstruction era and painted the Klan as the heroic savior of newly oppressed white southerners. The film, or “photoplay,” as it was called, had become a huge hit nationwide, though its critics, in particular the six-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, decried its content and held protests outside movie theaters, prompting Griffith to give the film a more palatable name, The Birth of a Nation. On Friday, April 30, the president’s personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, had issued a statement saying, “The President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it.” Wilson had agreed to the showing, Tumulty said, as a “courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”
And of course, there was the latest news of the war. A German drive against the Russians along the Baltic Sea had gained ground; back-and-forth fighting in Champagne and along the Meuse had gained nothing. German troops reinforced their position in the Ypres Salient. In Van Province, the Turks renewed their attacks against Armenian civilians; far to the west, Allied forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula were said to have routed the Turks, though this account would shortly be proven inaccurate. There was also a brief report about the bombing of the American ship Cushing.