by Erik Larson
Once safely out to sea and past the northern lip of Scotland, Schwieger set a course that would take him down the west flank of the Outer Hebrides, a bulwark of islands situated off Scotland’s northwest coast. His patrol zone off Liverpool was still a three-day voyage away.
The heave of the sea had lessened, producing swells of only 3 feet. Schwieger kept the boat on the surface. At 9:30 P.M. he signed his log to close the third day of his patrol.
Three days out, and he had sunk nothing—had not even fired his deck gun.
LATER THAT NIGHT, Schwieger was summoned into the shelter atop the conning tower. A lookout had spotted a potential target. In his log Schwieger described it as a “huge neutral steamer, its name lighted.” He judged it to be a Danish passenger liner out of Copenhagen, bound for Montreal. To determine this, Schwieger may have relied on his “War Pilot,” a merchant officer named Lanz, who served aboard U-20 to help identify ships. Between Lanz’s expertise and an immense book carried aboard every submarine that provided silhouettes and descriptions of nearly all ships afloat, Schwieger could be reasonably certain of the identities of any large vessel that came into view.
Though it’s clear Schwieger considered the Danish ship a potential target, he made no attempt to attack. The ship was too far ahead and moving too fast; he estimated its speed to be at least 12 knots. “An attack on this ship impossible,” he wrote in his log.
This entry revealed much about Schwieger. It showed that he would have been more than willing to attack if circumstances had been better, even though he recognized the ship was neutral—and not just neutral but heading away from Britain and thus unlikely to be carrying any contraband for Germany’s enemies. The entry revealed as well that he had no misgivings about torpedoing a liner full of civilians.
LUSITANIA
HALIBUT
THE WEATHER REMAINED GLOOMY THROUGHOUT SUNDAY and into Monday. Rain and wind made the decks cold, and for the second day in a row passengers inclined to seasickness withdrew to their cabins.
Each day Captain Turner ordered lifeboat and fire drills and tests of the bulkhead doors between the ship’s waterproof compartments. During lifeboat drills at sea the crew did not actually launch any boats, as they had at the wharf in New York, because to do so while the ship was moving would likely have fatal consequences for anyone in the lifeboat. A ship had to be fully stopped before the crew could lower a boat safely.
These daily drills involved only the ship’s two “emergency boats,” which were kept swung out at all times in order to be ready should a passenger fall overboard or some other incident arise. These were boats 13 and 14, on opposite sides of the ship. Every morning a squad of crewmen would gather at whichever boat was on the lee side of the deck, meaning away from the wind. John Lewis, senior third mate, directed the drills. The men stood at attention. At Lewis’s command—“Man the boats!”—they climbed in, put on their life jackets, and sat in their assigned places. Lewis then dismissed the crew.
Lewis also participated in Staff Captain Jock Anderson’s daily inspections of the entire ship, which began every morning at 10:30. Four other men typically went along as well: the ship’s senior surgeon, the assistant surgeon, the purser, and the chief steward. They gathered outside the purser’s office, or “Purser’s Bureau,” at the center of B Deck, opposite the ship’s two electric elevators, then set off to tour the ship. They checked a sample of cabins and the ship’s dining rooms, lounges, lavatories, boilers, and passages, from A Deck to steerage, to “see that everything was clean and in order,” Lewis said. They paid particular attention to whether any portholes—“air ports,” Lewis called them—had been left open, especially in the lower decks.
The inspections, drills, and other activities of the crew provided an element of diversion for passengers. Seaman Leslie Morton became something of an attraction aboard ship because of his skill at tying complex knots. “I remember putting an eye splice in an eight stranded wire hawser on the fore deck, with a crowd of admiring passengers watching me, which called forth all my latent histrionic abilities,” Morton wrote. The performance, at least according to his own recollection, drew “ ‘Oos’ and ‘Ahs’ and gasps.”
NO ONE ABOARD knew, as yet, about the May 1 torpedoing of the American oil tanker Gulflight or that in Washington the incident had sparked concern as to the safety of the Lusitania itself. The attack, coming as it did on the same day as publication of Germany’s advisory against travel through the war zone, suggested that the warning was more than mere bluff. The Washington Times, without identifying sources, stated, “The liner Lusitania, with several hundred prominent Americans on board, is steaming toward England despite anonymous warnings to individual passengers and a formally signed warning published in the advertising columns of American newspapers—warnings, which, in view of late developments in the sea war zone, it is beginning to be feared, may prove far from empty.” The article noted further that “hundreds of Americans are holding their breaths lest relatives on board such vessels go down.”
It reported that federal officials were perplexed about Germany’s intentions. One question seemed to be on everyone’s mind: “What is the German government driving at? Is it bent on incurring war with the United States?”
No one had any doubts that the Gulflight incident would be resolved through diplomacy, the article said. “But what is worrying everybody is the accumulation of evidence that Germany is either looking for trouble with the United States or that her authorities are reckless of the possibilities of incurring trouble.”
AS THE LUSITANIA steamed on, the usual shipboard tedium began to set in, and meals became increasingly important. In these first days of the voyage, passengers adapted themselves to their assigned table mates. For Charles Lauriat, this was simple: his friend Withington was his dining companion. For Liverpool police detective Pierpoint, it was even simpler: he dined alone. Unaccompanied travelers, however, faced the potential of being seated among tiresome souls with whom they had nothing in common. Invariably one encountered charmers and boors, sheep and braggarts; one young woman found herself seated beside “a very dyspeptic sort of fellow.” Sparks flew, or got damped. Romances got kindled.
But the food was always good and plentiful, even in third class, where blue marrowfat peas were a staple, as were Wiltshire cheeses and tinned pears, peaches, apricots, and pineapples. In first class, the food was beyond good. Lavish. First-class passengers were offered soups, hors d’oeuvres, and a multitude of entrées at each meal. On one voyage the menu for a single dinner included halibut in a sauce Orleans, mignons de sole souchet, and broiled sea bass Choron (a sauce of white wine, shallots, tarragon, tomato paste, and eggs); veal cutlets, tournedos of beef Bordelaise, baked Virginia ham, saddle of mutton, roast teal duck, celery-fed duckling, roast guinea chicken, sirloin and ribs of beef; and five desserts—a Tyrollean soufflé, chocolate cake, apple tart, Bavaroise au citron, and ice cream, two kinds: strawberry and Neapolitan. There were so many items on the menu that Cunard felt obliged to print a separate sheet with suggested combinations, lest one starve from befuddlement.
Passengers drank and smoked. Both; a lot. This was a significant source of profit for Cunard. The company laid in a supply of 150 cases of Black & White Whiskey, 50 cases of Canadian Club Whiskey, and 50 of Plymouth Gin; also, 15 cases each of an eleven-year-old French red wine, a Chambertin, and an eleven-year-old French white, a Chablis, and twelve barrels of stout and ten of ale. Cunard stockpiled thirty thousand “Three Castles” cigarettes and ten thousand Manila cigars. The ship also sold cigars from Havana and American cigarettes made by Phillip Morris. For the many passengers who brought pipes, Cunard acquired 560 pounds of loose Capstan tobacco—“navy cut”—and 200 pounds of Lord Nelson Flake, both in 4-ounce tins. Passengers also brought their own. Michael Byrne, a retired New York merchant and former deputy sheriff traveling in first class, apparently planned to spend a good deal of the voyage smoking. He packed 11 pounds of Old Rover Tobacco and three hundred cig
ars. During the voyage, the scent of combusted tobacco was ever present, especially after dinner.
The dominant topic of conversation, according to passenger Harold Smethurst, was “war, and submarines.”
FOR THEODATE POPE, there was tedium, but also depression. Ever since childhood she had struggled with it. Theodate described herself once as being afflicted with “over consciousness.” During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion.
Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.”
Theodate complied with the rules of Mitchell’s rest cure, even though she believed rest to be the last thing she needed. She wrote, “I am always happy when I keep so busy that I cannot stop to think of the sadness of life.” The cure didn’t help. And in fact, Dr. Mitchell’s approach was soon to undergo a nationwide reevaluation. In 1892 a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a popular short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in which she attacked Mitchell’s rest cure. Gilman had become a patient of his in 1887, a year before Theodate’s treatment, suffering from what a later generation would describe as postpartum depression. Gilman spent a month at Dr. Mitchell’s clinic. Afterward, he wrote out a prescription for how she was to proceed after treatment: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours intellectual life a day.”
And this: “Never touch pen, brush, or pencil again as long as you live.”
Gilman claimed that Mitchell’s cure drove her “to the edge of insanity.” She wrote the story, she said, to warn would-be patients of the dangers of this doctor “who so nearly drove me mad.”
Theodate continued fighting depression throughout her thirties. By the autumn of 1900, when she was thirty-three, it threatened even to deaden her love of art and architecture. “I find that my material world is losing its power to please or harm me—it is not vital to me anymore,” she wrote in her diary. “I am turning in on myself and am finding my pleasure in the inner world which was my constant retreat when I was a child.” Even her interest in paintings began to wane. She wrote, “Pictures have been dead long ago to me—the ones that please me, please me only at first sight—after that they are paint and nothing more; to use a vulgar expression, ‘sucked lemons.’ ” Architecture continued to engage her, but with less ferocity. “My interest in architecture has always been more intense than my interest in any other art manifestation. And on my word I think it is not dead yet—not quite.” She was, she wrote, “tired of seeing these fluted flimsy highly colored hen houses going up—and am gnashing my teeth over them.”
She and Edwin Friend dined together, and at least for a time shared their table with a young doctor from Saratoga Springs, New York, named James Houghton, and with one of the ship’s more famous personages, Marie Depage, a nurse who, along with her physician-husband, Antoine, had gained fame for tending Belgians wounded in the war. Depage had spent the previous two months raising money to support their work, but was now on her way back to Europe to see her son, Lucien, before he was sent to the front. Dr. Houghton, en route to Belgium to help Depage’s husband, at one point revealed that on the night before the Lusitania’s departure he had signed a new will.
Such talk did not move Theodate. She wrote, “I truly believe there was no one on the ship who valued life as little as I do.”
MARGARET MACKWORTH and her father, D. A. Thomas, were seated at a table in the first-class dining room with an American doctor and his sister-in-law, Dorothy Conner, twenty-five, from Medford, Oregon. Conner was a woman of energy and candor. She was also bored and given to impetuous remarks. At one point, Conner said, “I can’t help hoping that we get some sort of thrill going up the Channel.”
Margaret took note of the curiously high number of children on the passenger list. “We noticed this with much surprise,” she wrote. She attributed this to families moving from Canada to England to be near husbands and fathers fighting in the war.
She took the German Embassy’s warning seriously and told herself that in case of trouble she would have to override her instinct to run immediately to the boat deck and instead go first to her cabin and get her life jacket.
PRESTON PRICHARD, the young medical student heading home from Canada, found himself seated at a long table in the second-class dining hall directly opposite a young woman named Grace French, of Renton, England, who was among those passengers transferred to the ship from the Cameronia. She seemed to take an interest in Prichard or at least found him worth examining in some detail. She saw that he had a narrow tie with a red stripe, and she paid close enough attention to realize that he had only two suits, “one very smart navy blue serge and a green suit; more for knock-about wear.” She also noted his lava-head tie clasp. “About the heads I remember them distinctly because my father once had ones similar and they took my eye, and so far as I can remember he wore it all the time.”
Prichard was kind and funny and full of stories. And very good looking. “He kept us in good spirits relating different experiences he had during his travels and was very nice to everybody,” she wrote. “I appreciated his efforts as I was very sick”—seasick—“during the whole journey, and [he] was especially nice to me.”
She also took note of the lucky young woman, also English, who’d been assigned the seat right next to Prichard. With a whiff of a meow, Miss French described this potential rival as “very short,” with “light brown hair, blue eyes, lots of color in her face, and I think she was visiting in California, at least she talked a great deal about its beauties and advantage.” She added: “They were great friends at the dining table.”
In addition to playing whist, Prichard took part in the mileage betting pools and in various deck sports, including tug-of-war and an improvised obstacle course. “A party of us used to have a game of skipping every day,” one young woman recalled. At a certain point another participant, a young man, tried to use the jump rope to lasso her but failed. Prichard stepped forward and showed the group how to do it. He seemed to be an expert at lassoing and roped many of the players. “I never saw him again after this,” the woman said.
She touched on a peculiar aspect of life aboard such a large ship: you might meet someone who interested you in one way or another, but unless that person happened to be assigned to your table or your room, or occupied the deck chair next to yours, you had little opportunity to build a closer association. The ship was too big. Gertrude Adams, a passenger in second class traveling with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, wrote later, “There were so many on the ship that it really was like living in a town, one saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”
It was a mark of
Prichard’s popularity that so many casual acquaintances remembered him at all.
IN THE EVENING, select guests would be invited to sit at a table presided over by Staff Captain Anderson, or at Captain Turner’s table, on those occasions when Turner was willing to suppress his antipathy toward social engagement. As a rule, he preferred to take his meals in his cabin or on the bridge. He was particularly fond of chicken and during one meal drove his first officer nearly mad with his effort to gnaw every last morsel off a chicken leg.
U-20
THE TROUBLE WITH TORPEDOES
EARLY ON MONDAY MORNING U-20 WAS SAILING THROUGH a world of cobalt and cantaloupe. “Very beautiful weather,” Schwieger noted, in a 4:00 A.M. entry in his log. The boat was abreast of Sule Skerry, a small island west of the Orkneys with an 88-foot lighthouse, said to be the most remote and isolated light in the British Isles.
Schwieger sailed a southwesterly course. He saw no targets but also no threats and was able to stay on the surface the entire day. Toward nightfall, at 6:50 P.M., he at last spotted a potential target, a steamer of about two thousand tons. It flew a Danish flag off its stern, but Schwieger’s war pilot, Lanz, believed the flag was a ruse, that the ship was in fact a British vessel out of Edinburgh. It was heading toward U-20. Schwieger ordered a fast dive, to periscope depth.