Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  FOR 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.”

  MARGARET MACKWORTH 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.”

  Conner and her brother-in-law moved to the rail. Mackworth held back.

  Conner wrote, “One gets very close in three minutes at such a time, and just before we jumped I grabbed her hand and squeezed to try and encourage her.”

  But Mackworth stayed behind. Her last recollection was of water up to her knees, and the ship sliding away, pulling her down.

  THEODORE AND Belle Naish, the Kansas City couple who just hours earlier had been admiring the sunrise from the ship’s top deck, also stood at the rail. They wore life jackets and stood arm in arm, talking quietly. Having watched one lifeboat dump its occupants into the sea, they made no effort to get into another. A member of the crew told them, “She’s all right, she will float for an hour.” But Belle did not believe him. She’d been watching the rail and the horizon line. The changing differential told her the ship was sinking quickly. She said, “We’ll be gone in a minute.”

  She took her arm from Theodore’s, so as not to drag him under. “We watched the water, talked to each other; there seemed to be a great rush, a roar and a splintering sound, then the lifeboat or something swung over our heads.” The boat struck her and cut her scalp. She held out an arm to protect Theodore. A sudden shift in the deck brought water to her armpits. “It seemed as if everything in the universe ripped and tore.”

  And then she was deep underwater—by her estimate, 20 or 30 feet. She looked up and saw the brilliant blue of the sky through the water. “I thought about how wondrously beautiful the sunlight and water were from below the surface,” she wrote. She was not afraid. “I thought, ‘Why, this is like being in my grandmother’s feather bed.’ I kicked, and rose faster.”

  Her head struck something, and continued to bump against it. “I put up my right hand, saw the blue sky and found myself clinging to the bumper of life boat 22.” A man reached for her. She was so grateful she asked him to write his name on the inside of her shoe, “lest in the experience to follow I might forget.”

  The name was Hertz, for Douglas Hertz, a young man who was returning to England to join the South Lancashire Regiment, after living for a time in St. Louis. The sinking crowned a troubled period for Hertz. In 1913, he had lost his wife in a train wreck on their honeymoon; that same year, his mother had died in a house fire.

  Belle saw no sign of her husband.

  AFTER HELPING to launch a starboard boat, No. 13, Seaman Leslie Morton went to help with a second, also on the starboard side. He and another sailor, under the direction of a petty officer, struggled to help passengers get across the gap between the ship and the boat. The final angle of list, by Morton’s estimate, was 30 degrees. Sixty passengers made it. Asked later how this feat had been achieved, Morton answered, “If you had to jump six or seven feet, or certainly drown, it is surprising what ‘a hell of a long way’ even older people can jump.”

  Morton worked the stern falls, as the petty officer directed the operation. The ship was still moving at 4 or 5 knots. The men lowered the lifeboat until its keel was just above the surface, and then, in accord with procedures for just this kind of circumstance, they let the lines play out so that when the boat touched water it would slip backward.

  It drifted back one boat’s length. The falls and the forward motion of the ship caused the boat to ride against the ship’s hull. Morton was just about to climb down the stern ropes to clear the lifeboat when a group of less experienced men—Morton thought they might be stewards or waiters—began lowering the next boat back and lost control of its descent. The boat dropped 30 feet onto Morton’s boat and the passengers within.

  There was no time “to waste in either horror or sympathy,” Morton wrote. He looked for his brother, amid mounting confusion, “many people losing their hold on the deck and slipping down and over the side, and a gradual crescendo of noise building up as the hundreds and hundreds of people began to realize that, not only was she going down very fast but in all probability too fast for them all to get away.”

  He found his brother at another lifeboat and helped him to lower it. The brothers then slid down and released the falls and used boat hooks to try shoving the lifeboat away from the hull. The passengers wouldn’t let go of the ship. They held tight to various ropes and to the deck rails, “in some mistaken belief,” Morton wrote, “that they would be safer hanging on to the big ship rather than entrusting their lives in the small lifeboat.” The Lusitania’s deck came steadily downward.

  Something snagged the gunnel of the lifeboat and began tipping it toward the ship’s hull. “The time for heroics was obviously past,” Morton wrote, “and my brother yelled at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going over the side, Gertie.’ ”

  The brothers waved at each other, then both dove into the sea. Neither wore a life jacket.

  Morton wrote, “As I hit the water, and it is strange what one thinks about in times of stress, I suddenly remembered that my brother had never been able to swim.”

  Morton came to the surface and looked for his brother, “but seeing the turmoil of bodies, women and children, deck chairs, lifebelts, lifeboats, and every describable thing around me, coupled with no less than 35,000 tons of Lusitania breathing very heavily down my neck and altogether too close for my liking,” he began to swim. Hard.

  He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.

  LAURIAT SWAM clear of the ship—or thought he had. He turned to watch its final moments. The bow was submerged, and slipping deeper into the sea; the stern was high in the air. The list to starboard had become so pronounced that passengers could stand upright only by propping themselves against the starboard rail, where they accumulated three or four deep in a long line that extended up toward the stern. Another witness called this assemblage “a little army.” If anyone still h
arbored a hope that the Lusitania would not sink, that hope now failed.

  Passengers back toward the stern, and therefore higher, watched as those ahead in line lost their grip on the rail. Those wearing life jackets floated, as if levitated from the deck; the many without jackets attempted to swim or sank from view.

  Third Officer Bestic, still aboard, felt the ship make a “peculiar lurching movement” and looked down the deck. “An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path,” he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it engulfed. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”

  AS MEASLE-POXED Robert Kay and his pregnant mother struggled to ascend to the boat deck, the sounds of commotion above became more and more clear. They emerged to find themselves in a crush of people climbing toward the stern to escape the water ascending the deck. Robert watched people jump from the rails.

  The ship continued to move; its stern rose higher. His mother held him close. And then the sea seemed to leap forward, and his mother was gone. They were separated; he was cast into a roiling turbulence. The ship disappeared.

  Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.

  AS CHARLES LAURIAT watched the ship pass and descend, something struck his head with shocking force. Whatever the thing was, it slipped back onto the shoulders of his life jacket, and caught there, and dragged him under. “I couldn’t imagine what was landing on me out of the sky,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t have been as much surprised if the submarine had risen and I had found myself on her, but to get a bolt from the blue did surprise me.”

  He turned his head and saw that the thing that had snagged him was a wire stretched between the ship’s two masts. This, he realized, was the Lusitania’s wireless antenna. He tried to shake it off but failed. It turned him upside down and pushed him ever deeper below the surface.

  TELEGRAM

  FRIDAY,

  MAY 7, 1915

  2:26 P.M.

  “S.O.S. FROM ‘LUSITANIA.’ WE THINK WE ARE OFF KINSALE. LATE POSITION 10 MILES OFF KINSALE COME AT ONCE BIG LIST LATER PLEASE COME WITH ALL HASTE.”

  LUSITANIA

  A QUEEN’S END

  ONLY SIX OF THE LUSITANIA’S TWENTY-TWO CONVENTIONAL lifeboats got away before the ship made its final plunge; a seventh, from the port side, reached the water, but without a crucial plug. The boat filled, and foundered.

  Those passengers who had already jumped from the ship swam to get as far away as possible, for fear that the ship’s descent would generate suction that would drag them down as well. This did not occur, although three passengers did experience a kindred effect. One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot. Two other passengers accompanied her into the funnel—Harold Taylor, twenty-one, also newly married, and Liverpool police inspector William Pierpoint. They too emerged alive, with blackened faces and bodies.

  As the ship’s bow nosed down, its stern rose, exposing its four giant propellers, which glinted gold in the sun. By now the Lusitania was 2 miles from the point where the torpedo had struck, and about 12 miles from the Old Head of Kinsale. In these last moments, the angle of starboard list decreased to only about 5 degrees, as water filled the rest of ship.

  Seaman Morton turned onto his back and watched. He saw passengers swept from the deck and hundreds of others struggling to climb toward the stern. The Lusitania again heeled to starboard and slipped from view, in “a slow, almost stately, dive by the head, at an angle of some forty-five or fifty degrees.”

  Dwight Harris, floating a good distance astern in his Wanamaker’s life belt, watched as the ship “plunged forward like a knife blade into the water—funnels, masts, boats, etc., all breaking to pieces and falling about everywhere! A terrible mass of iron, wood, steam, and water! And worst of all, human forms!—A great swirling greenish white bubble formed where the ship went down, which was a mass of struggling humanity and wreckage! The bubble got bigger and bigger, and fortunately only came to within twenty or thirty yards of me shoving wreckage with it.”

  THIS UPHEAVAL was a singular feature of the ship’s demise, commented upon by many survivors. The sea rose as a plateau of water that spread in all directions. It carried bodies and masses of debris, and was accompanied by a strange sound.

  Charles Lauriat emerged just as the Lusitania disappeared. By kicking hard he somehow managed to free himself of the antenna wire. “As she went under,” Lauriat wrote, “I was not conscious of hearing cries; rather it was a long, lingering moan that rose, and which lasted for many moments after she disappeared.” Lauriat was overtaken by the wave. “The mass of wreckage was tremendous,” he wrote. “Aside from the people brought out with it, there were deck chairs, oars, boxes, and I can’t remember what. I simply know that one moment one was jammed between large objects, and the next moment one was under the water.”

  Countless souls struggled in the sea around him. There was little he could do beyond shoving an oar or some other piece of floating debris in their direction. Many passengers wore heavy coats; women wore multiple layers of clothing—corsets, camisoles, petticoats, jumpers, furs—and all these quickly became sodden and heavy. Passengers without life jackets sank. The complicated clothing of children and infants bore them under as well.

  One of the most disconcerting sights reported by survivors was of hundreds of hands waving above the water, beseeching help. But soon there was quiet. Survivors reported seeing a plume of smoke from a steamer to the south, but it came no closer. The time that had elapsed since the impact of the torpedo was eighteen minutes.

  Seagulls came now and moved among the floating bodies.

  CAPTAIN TURNER was still on the bridge as the navigation deck submerged. The sea in the distance was a shimmery blue, but up close, green and clear. The sun penetrating the upper strata of water caught the paint and brightwork of the deck as it fell away below him.

  Helmsman Hugh Johnston saw Turner on the bridge wing, moving from port to starboard and back, wearing a life jacket but otherwise making no attempt to dodge the customary fate of a sea captain. Johnston said, later, that he’d “never met anyone as ‘cool’ ” as Turner.

  The ship at that point was still moving, but slowly, with a wake full of wreckage and corpses spreading behind it, fed by the hundreds of men, women, and children who through accident or fear had remained on the ship. They streamed off like the knots in a kite’s tail.

  AT 2:33 P.M., the wireless station at the Old Head of Kinsale sent the Admiralty a two-word message: “ ‘Lusitania’ sunk.”

  Observers on the Old Head had seen it happen. A great ship, present one moment, gone the next, leaving what appeared at a distance to be an empty blue sea.

  Captain Turner’s pocket watch, which would eventually make its way into a Liverpool museum, stopped at 2:36:15.

  ALL POINTS

  RUMOR

  THE AMERICAN CONSULATE IN QUEENSTOWN, IRELAND, was located in a suite of rooms above a bar, overlooking the harbor. Behind the building stood the great spire of St. Colman’s Cathedral, which dwarfed every other structure in town. That afternoon, Consul Wesley Frost was at work revising his annual report on commercial conditions in various Irish counties when, at 2:30, his vice-consul came pounding up the stairs to report a fast-spreading rumor that a submarine had attacked the Lusitania.

  Frost walked to the windows and saw an unusual surge of activity in the harbor below. Every vessel, of every size, seemed to be leaving, including the big cruiser Juno, which had arrived only a short while earlier. Frost counted two dozen craft in all.

  He went to his telephone and called the office of Adm. Charles Henry Coke, the senior
naval officer for Queenstown, and spoke to the admiral’s secretary. Frost chose his words with care, not wishing to appear to be a dupe of someone’s practical joke. He said, “I hear there is some sort of street rumor that the Lusitania has been attacked.”

  The secretary replied, “It’s true, Mr. Frost. We fear she is gone.”

  Frost listened in a daze as the secretary told him about the SOS messages and the report from eyewitnesses on Kinsale Head confirming the disappearance of the ship.

  After hanging up, Frost paced his office, trying to absorb what had occurred and thinking about what to do next. He telegraphed the news to U.S. ambassador Page in London.

  ADMIRAL COKE had dispatched all the rescue craft he could, including the Juno, and telegraphed the Admiralty that he had done so.

  The Juno was the fastest ship available. Queenstown was two dozen miles from the reported site of the attack. Most of the smaller vessels would be lucky to cover that distance in three or four hours; given the calm air, sail-powered craft would take even longer. The Juno, capable of making 18 knots, or 20 miles an hour, could do it in just over one hour. Its crew moved with great haste, and soon the old cruiser was under way.

  But the Admiralty fired back a reply: “Urgent: Recall Juno.” The order was a direct offspring of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue disaster: no large warship was to go to the aid of victims of a U-boat attack. The risk was too great that the submarine might still be present, waiting to sink ships coming to the rescue.

  Coke apparently had second thoughts of his own, for even before the Admiralty’s message arrived he ordered the Juno back into port. His rationale for deciding to recall the ship did not conform to the Admiralty’s, however. After dispatching the Juno, he explained, “I then received a telegram stating that the Lusitania had sunk. The urgent necessity for the Juno no longer obtaining I recalled her.”