Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Meanwhile, the lifeboats on the opposite side, the port side, had swung inward over the deck. These were all but unusable. Only a great effort could move them into position for launch. Capt. Turner ordered them emptied, but as the ship’s condition worsened, passengers and crew tried to launch them anyway.

  Ogden Hammond, the New Jersey real-estate developer who’d been assured the ship was as safe as a New York trolley, walked along the port side of the boat deck with his wife, Mary, until they found themselves at Boat No. 20, which a group of crewmen and male passengers had somehow muscled to a point outside the rail. Women and children were climbing aboard.

  Neither Mary nor Ogden wore a life jacket. He had wanted to go down to their stateroom and retrieve the jackets stored there, but Mary had pleaded with him not to leave her. They had hunted for jackets on deck but found none.

  At the lifeboat, Ogden balked at climbing aboard, out of respect for the maritime custom that gave women and children priority. Mary refused to go unless Ogden came too, so the couple stood aside, watching the process and waiting. At last Ogden agreed to get in. He and Mary took a place near the bow. The boat was half full, with about thirty-five people, when the attempt to launch it began.

  Men at the bow and stern manipulated the ropes—the falls—that ran through block and tackle at each end of the boat. A sailor at the bow lost control of his rope. Ogden tried to grab it, but the rope was running so fast it tore the skin from his hands. The bow plunged; the stern rope held. Everyone fell from the boat into the sea, 60 feet below.

  Ogden came to the surface; his wife did not. He reached for an oar floating nearby.

  AT THE NEXT port-side boat, No. 18, another launching attempt had stalled. This boat contained forty women and children, and was held in place by a restraining pin. The sailor in charge refused to lower it, in accord with Turner’s orders, but held an ax, ready to knock the pin loose should the orders change. Several dozen passengers stood between the boat and the outer wall of the first-class smoking room.

  Isaac Lehmann, the New York businessman, was shocked that no effort was being made to launch the boat. He had managed to find a life jacket; his revolver was in his pocket. He glanced toward the ship’s bow and saw water advancing along the deck. He demanded to know why the sailor didn’t act.

  “It is the captain’s orders not to launch any boats,” the sailor replied.

  “To hell with the captain,” Lehmann said. “Don’t you see the boat is sinking?” He drew his revolver. “And the first man that disobeys my orders to launch the boat I shoot to kill!”

  The sailor complied. He swung his ax to knock out the restraining pin. The boat was heavy to begin with, but now loaded with three tons of humanity it swung inward, crushing everyone between the boat and the wall. At least two passengers, sisters in their fifties, died instantly, of injuries associated with severe crushing. Lehmann’s right leg was damaged, but he managed to crawl from the mass of wounded bystanders. This was not easy. He was a large, round man and wore a long overcoat and a life jacket.

  Passengers and crew again attempted to launch the lifeboat. They were making progress when something went awry and this boat too dumped its passengers into the water. At about the same time, Lehmann said, a “terrific explosion” rose from the deck in the direction of the bow. This new convulsion was likely caused by water infiltrating yet another boiler room and coming in contact with a superheated tank, one of a number of such secondary eruptions. Only about fourteen minutes had passed since the torpedo impact, but the sea was climbing fast.

  MANY PASSENGERS decided to forgo the boats and take a more direct path. Dwight Harris headed toward the bow, as per his plan. He climbed over the port rail on A Deck and scuttled down the side of the ship, two decks, then went toward the bow, which had sunk to the point where all he would have to do was step into the water. He took off his shoes and discarded his overcoat, his hat, and his Medici book. He had no life jacket, not even his custom Wanamaker’s belt. He too had been afraid to go to his cabin for fear of being trapped. But now, at the water’s edge and facing the real prospect of drowning, he changed his mind.

  “I took a look at things and decided I must have a life belt so I climbed up again to ‘A’ deck and rushed to my cabin,” he wrote. He put the belt on and returned to the bow. An officer called to him to come up to the lifeboats, “but I realized that all available space in them was badly wanted, so I shook my head no!—I got up on the rail, swung my feet over, and when the water got right up to the deck I jumped overboard!”

  As he swam away, he looked up, and saw the ship’s giant funnels move past against the sky.

  THEODATE POPE and Edwin Friend had planned that if an emergency arose they would rendezvous on the boat deck with Theodate’s maid, Emily Robinson. “The deck suddenly looked very strange crowded with people,” Theodate wrote, “and I remember two women were crying in a pitifully weak way.” Theodate and Friend looked over the port side and watched a boat being lowered. One end fell too fast and everyone plummeted into the sea. This could have been Ogden Hammond’s boat, or the one Lehmann tried to launch at gunpoint. “We looked at each other, sickened by the sight, and then made our way through the crowd for deck B on the starboard side.”

  As they stood at the rail, they saw that efforts to launch the lifeboats on this side were having more success. Boats came down past them, winched slowly from the deck above. The two feared the ship was sinking so quickly and with so pronounced a list that it might roll onto the boats after they reached the water.

  They climbed back up to the boat deck but made no attempt to board any of the remaining lifeboats.

  “We walked close together, side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist,” Theodate recalled. The two met a passenger whom by now they knew well, Marie Depage, the Belgian nurse. Depage seemed stunned. “She had a man on either side of her, friends of hers, so I did not speak,” Theodate wrote. “It was no time for words unless one could offer help.”

  Theodate and Friend headed toward the stern, now an uphill climb. Her maid came up beside them and Theodate noted the tense smile etched on her face. “I could only put my hand on her shoulder and say, ‘Oh Robinson.’ ”

  They searched for life jackets. They entered several cabins and found three. Friend helped the women put them on; they all walked to the rail. The ship’s giant funnels towered above them at an exaggerated slant. The water was far below.

  Theodate glanced at Friend. The two looked down at the water. The time had come. “I asked him to go first,” she wrote.

  Friend climbed down one deck, then jumped. He disappeared briefly, but soon bobbed to the surface, and looked up at the women. The ship continued to move forward; his form receded.

  Theodate said, “Come Robinson,” and stepped off the rail.

  GRACE FRENCH ran back to where she and Preston Prichard had been standing at the moment of impact. He was nowhere in sight. She went to the rail, took off her coat, and jumped. She had no life jacket. Her plan was to swim until she found a piece of floating debris. The jump took her deep under the surface, where an eddy caused by the passing ship held her down.

  BY 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,” SCHWIEGER 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

  CERTAIN NOW THAT THE SHIP WOULD SINK, CHARLES 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.

  SHIPBUILDER SAMUEL KNOX 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.

  NORAH BRETHERTON, 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.

  THEODATE POPE 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.”

  ELSEWHERE 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 fea
thers: 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.”

  GRACE FRENCH, 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.”

  DWIGHT HARRIS 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.