Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  He recognized her only when the collapsible came right under the smack’s rail, and he was able to look directly into her face. He wept.

  It was now 6:00 P.M. Lauriat counted the number of survivors that he and his companions had picked up along the way: thirty-two. Fifty other survivors were already on the smack. Before climbing aboard, Lauriat pocketed one of the collapsible’s oarlocks as a souvenir.

  An hour later, he and the rest were transferred to a steam side-wheeler, the Flying Fish, which then set out for Queenstown. The survivors crowded into its engine room, for the warmth. Here was Ogden Hammond, the New Jersey real-estate developer. No one had seen his wife. The heat was exquisite, and “and before very long,” reported Arthur Mitchell, the Raleigh Bicycle man, “songs were being sung, indicating not only a spirit of thankfulness but even of gaiety.”

  A number of corpses were on board as well: a five-year-old boy named Dean Winston Hodges; two unidentified boys, about two and six years old; and the body of fifteen-year-old Gwendolyn Allan, one of the girls who had helped seaman Morton paint a lifeboat.

  DWIGHT HARRIS helped row his collapsible boat toward a distant sailboat. The going was slow and difficult. Another lifeboat got there first and unloaded a cache of survivors and bodies, then came back for Harris and his companions and put them aboard the sailboat as well. Next all were transferred to a minesweeper called the Indian Empire, whose crew spent the next several hours searching for survivors and bodies. When the ship began its return to Queenstown after seven o’clock that evening it carried 170 survivors and numerous dead.

  On board, the little boy whom Harris had rescued now found his father, mother, and brother—alive and well. His baby sister, Dora, was lost.

  THEODATE POPE awoke to a vision of blazing fire. A small fire, in a stove. She had no recollection of the sinking. She saw a pair of legs in trousers and then heard a man say, “She’s conscious.” Despite the warmth from the stove, tremors rattled her body.

  She was in the captain’s cabin of a ship named Julia. Another survivor aboard, Belle Naish, later told Theodate how she came to be there. Crew members had pulled Theodate aboard using boat hooks. Presuming her to be dead, they had left her on deck among other recovered bodies. Naish and Theodate had become friends during the voyage, and when Naish saw Theodate lying there she touched her body and sensed a trace of life. Naish called for help. Two men began trying to revive Theodate. One used a carving knife from the ship’s kitchen to cut off her sodden layers of clothing. The men worked on her for two hours until confident they had revived her—though she remained unconscious. A lurid bruise surrounded her right eye.

  There was no sign of Theodate’s companion, Edwin Friend, or of her maid, Emily Robinson.

  U-20

  PARTING SHOT

  LATER, A WOMAN WHO CLAIMED TO BE SCHWIEGER’S FIANCÉE told a newspaper reporter that the attack on the Lusitania had left Schwieger a shattered man. (The reporter did not disclose her name.) When Schwieger visited her in Berlin after his return to base, she had no idea, at first, that it was he who had torpedoed the ship. “All we thought of was that one of the fastest and biggest English ships had been sunk, and we were all very glad,” she said. But Schwieger seemed not to share the elation. “Of course, his mother and I saw right away that something dreadful had happened to him. He was so haggard and so silent, and so—different.”

  Schwieger told her the story of the attack. “Of course he couldn’t hear anything, but he could see, and the silence of it all in the U-boat was worse than if he could have heard the shrieks. And, of course, he was the only one in the U-boat who could even see. He didn’t dare let any of the others in the U-boat know what was happening.” After the attack he took the boat straight back to Germany, his fiancée said. “He wanted to get away from what he had done. He wanted to get ashore. He couldn’t torpedo another ship.”

  The woman’s account, while compelling, stands at odds with Schwieger’s own War Log. If Schwieger felt any sense of remorse, he did not express it by his actions.

  Just five minutes after taking his last look at the Lusitania, he spotted a large steamer ahead, coming toward him, and prepared to attack. He was supposed to keep two torpedoes in reserve for the voyage home—ideally one in the bow, one in the stern—but this was an irresistible target, a 9,000-ton tanker. Schwieger ordered full ahead, to position U-20 in front of the ship, stern-first, so that he could use one of his two stern tubes. At 4:08 P.M. he was ready. The shot was lined up perfectly: a 90-degree angle with the target’s course, at a point-blank range of 500 meters, about a third of a mile. “Conditions for our torpedo very favorable,” he wrote in his log; “a miss out of the question.”

  He gave the order to fire. The submarine shivered as the torpedo left its tube. Schwieger waited for the sound of impact.

  A long silence followed. As the seconds ticked past, he realized something had gone wrong.

  “As periscope is submerged for some time after torpedo had been fired, I am sorry to say that I could not ascertain what kind of a miss it was,” he wrote in his log. “The torpedo came out of its tube correctly, and either it did not run at all or at a wrong angle.” He doubted that anyone aboard the steamer even noticed.

  Schwieger resumed the voyage home. He surfaced to increase speed and recharge his batteries. From atop the conning tower, he saw the smoke trails of at least six large steamers in the distance, inbound and outbound, but made no further effort to attack. As it was, this would prove to be his most successful patrol. In the course of traveling a total of 3,006 miles, 250 under water, he had sunk 42,331 tons of shipping.

  THE STEAMER Schwieger had fired upon was a British oil tanker, the Narragansett, headed for New Jersey, and contrary to what he imagined, everyone aboard was very much aware of the near miss. The ship’s first officer had spotted the periscope, and the captain, Charles Harwood, had ordered a sharp turn and maximum speed.

  Harwood reported the encounter by wireless. At the time of the attack he had been responding to an SOS from the Lusitania, and had been racing to the scene, but now he suspected the SOS had been faked by the submarine to lure his ship and other would-be rescuers.

  His telegram, relayed to the Admiralty’s War Room in London, read, “We proceeded with all possible speed 3:45 p.m. sighted submarine about 200 yards on our starboard quarter, submarine fired torpedo which passed ten yards astern of us, maneuvered ship and got all clear; submarine was seen astern 10 minutes later 4 P.M.… Saw no sign of Lusitania believe call to be a hoax.”

  Captain Harwood changed heading and fled away from the last reported location of the Lusitania.

  LUSITANIA

  SEAGULLS

  HIS LIFE JACKET MADE HIM BUOYANT AND LIFTED HIM from the bridge, but the descending hull pulled him under. “The whole ship seemed to be plucked from my feet by a giant hand,” Turner said. When he came back to the surface, he found himself in an archipelago of destruction and death. “Hundreds of bodies were being whirled about among the wreckage,” he said. “Men, women and children were drifting between planks, lifeboats and an indescribable litter.”

  He had done all he could, he believed, and now an instinct to live ignited. He began to swim. He recognized another man nearby, William Pierpoint, the Liverpool police detective. All at once, Pierpoint disappeared. Like newlywed Margaret Gwyer, he was dragged into a funnel. “I thought he had gone,” Turner said. But in a burst of steam and hissing air, Pierpoint popped back out, his body coated with a layer of wet black soot that clung to him like enamel. At which point, Turner said, Pierpoint “started swimming for home like ten men, he was so scared.”

  The ship was still moving at about 4 knots, by Turner’s estimate. But as he watched, its bow struck bottom—he was sure of it. “I noticed it because the sinking of the hull stopped for a few seconds with the stern in the air, quivering her whole length of 800 feet, and then down she went.”

  It was a strange moment for a sea captain. Twenty minutes earlier Turner had
stood on the bridge in command of one of the greatest ocean liners ever known. Now, still in uniform, he floated in the place where his ship had been, in a calm sea under a brilliant blue sky, no deck, cabin, or hull in sight, not even the ship’s tall masts.

  He and Pierpoint swam together. Turner saw the bodies of some of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets—he counted forty in all. Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”

  Turner spent three hours in the water, until he was pulled aboard a lifeboat, and later was transferred to a fishing trawler, the Bluebell.

  MARGARET MACKWORTH’S first recollection, after having lost consciousness in the sea, was of awakening on the Bluebell’s deck, naked under a blanket, her teeth chattering, she wrote, “like castanets.”

  A sailor appeared above her, and said, “That’s better.”

  She was miffed. “I had a vague idea that something had happened but I thought that I was still on the deck of the Lusitania, and I was vaguely annoyed that some unknown sailor should be attending to me instead of my own stewardess.”

  Her confusion cleared; the sailor brought her tea. With somewhat less chivalry, he told her, “We left you up here to begin with as we thought you were dead, and it did not seem worth while cumbering up the cabin with you.”

  The sailor and two others helped her below decks, where she found an unexpected giddiness. “The warmth below was delicious,” she wrote; “it seemed to make one almost delirious.” Everyone around her seemed “a little drunk with the heat and the light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive. We were talking at the tops of our voices and laughing a great deal.”

  She recognized the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive or not. Another survivor in the cabin believed her own husband to be dead. “It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking up of her whole life,” Mackworth wrote, “yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.”

  Captain Turner did not share in the gaiety. He sat quietly by himself, in his sodden uniform.

  As Mackworth watched, a woman approached Turner and began telling him about the loss of her child. Her voice was low, almost a monotone. She had placed the boy on a raft, she said. The raft then capsized, and her son was gone. In the same dispassionate manner, she told Turner that her son’s death had been unnecessary—that it was caused by the lack of organization and discipline among the crew.

  THE RESCUE SHIPS reached Queenstown long after dark. The Flying Fish with Charles Lauriat aboard arrived at 9:15, the Bluebell at 11:00. The wharf was lit by gas torches that turned the evening mist a pale amber. Soldiers, sailors, and townspeople formed two lines that extended from the gangway into town. They applauded as survivors came ashore. Other soldiers waited in groups of four, with stretchers. Charles Lauriat carried one man on his back—the man with the broken leg, to whom he had spoken so rudely. The man proved to be Leonard McMurray, and this was his second shipwreck. He had survived the 1909 sinking of the White Star Line’s Republic, after a collision in fog with another liner.

  Lauriat’s Thackeray drawings and the Dickens Christmas Carol were somewhere deep in the Irish Sea. He sent his wife a telegram. “I saved the baby’s pictures,” he wrote. “They were my mascot.”

  He closed: “I regret your hours of suspense.”

  Margaret Mackworth learned upon docking that her father was alive. She was dressed only in a blanket and asked the Bluebell’s captain for safety pins, but the idea of pins aboard a ship like his made him laugh out loud. A soldier gave her his coat, a “British Warm”; the captain gave her his slippers. She tucked the blanket around her waist to form a makeshift skirt.

  She found her father waiting at the end of the gangplank. The relief and joy she felt reminded her of that time a month earlier when she had arrived in New York and seen him on the dock. As one of the first survivors to reach Queenstown, he had waited for hours as boat after boat came in, none carrying his daughter. With each successive arrival, the number of dead on board seemed to increase relative to the number of living souls. A friend said later that for a long time after this the father’s face had seemed like that of an elderly man.

  Dorothy Conner, the spunky young American who had sat at Mackworth’s table and had wanted a “thrill,” came to see her the next morning, Saturday. Conner seemed unruffled, Mackworth recalled. “She was still dressed in the neat fawn tweed coat and skirt which she had had on when I saw her step off the deck the day before, and it looked as smart and well tailored as if it had just come out of the shop.”

  Dwight Harris landed with his engagement ring and other jewelry still hung around his neck, and his money in his pocket. That night he found a shop that had stayed open for survivors and bought an undershirt, socks, slippers, and pajamas. He found a room in a hotel, which he shared with six other men, “and took a huge dose of whiskey before going to bed.” On Saturday morning he bought himself a suit, shirt, collar, raincoat, and cap. While doing so he happened to notice a boy of about eighteen who was asking the shopkeeper if he could have some clothes, even though he had no money to pay for them. The boy looked bereft. Harris volunteered to pay. He learned that the boy had lost his mother. “Poor fellow!” Harris wrote to his own mother. “I thank God you weren’t with me!!!”

  When Theodate Pope’s ship, the Julia, arrived, a doctor was summoned to come aboard to examine her. Assisted by two soldiers, the doctor helped her down to the wharf and into a motorcar, then accompanied her to a hotel. As she stepped from the car, she collapsed onto the sidewalk. The doctor helped her inside. “I was left on a lounge in a room full of men in all sorts of strange garments while the proprietress hurried to bring me brandy,” she wrote. One of the men was the English passenger who at lunch that day had joked about not getting torpedoed before having his ice cream. He was wearing a dressing gown. Pink.

  Theodate drank brandy and was helped to a room. Her face was swollen and discolored. She arranged to send her mother a telegram, one word: “Saved.”

  She tried to sleep. “All night I kept expecting Mr. Friend to appear, looking for me,” she wrote. “All night long men kept coming into our rooms, snapping on the lights, bringing children for us to identify, taking telegrams, getting our names for the list of survivors, etc., etc.”

  But Mr. Friend never did appear, nor did Theodate’s maid, Miss Robinson.

  TURNER WALKED ashore wrapped in a blanket. He spent the night at the home of a local banker. The next morning, in his uniform, he went for a walk. He had lost his Cunard hat and stopped at a haberdasher’s shop to buy something to replace it. A survivor named Beatrice Williams, who had also been aboard the Bluebell, saw him and bristled. “You should be worrying about a hat when so many of us have lost everything we own. Why—you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

  A correspondent for the New York World also encountered Turner that morning and conducted a brief interview. In a cable to his editor, the reporter wrote that the captain “appeared stunned.”

  The reporter informed Turner that the bodies of a number of Americans had been recovered, including that of Broadway producer Charles Frohman, with whom Turner had spoken on the morning of the ship’s departure. Upon hearing this, Turner seemed to struggle to control his emotions. Tears filled his eyes.

  QUEENSTOWN

  THE LOST

  OF THE LUSITANIA’S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 surv
ived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans.

  Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for one reason or another had ended up on the Lusitania, as was the case with the passengers of the Cameronia transferred to the ship at the last minute. The transfers included passengers Margaret and James Shineman, newlyweds from Oil City, Wyoming, who suddenly found themselves aboard the fastest, most luxurious ship in service, for their journey to Scotland to visit Margaret’s family. The visit was to be a surprise. Both were killed. Of the forty-two passengers and crew transferred, only thirteen survived, among them Miss Grace French, who breezed through the whole ordeal with aplomb.

  There was the usual confusion that follows disasters. For days dozens of cables shot back and forth between Cunard offices in Liverpool, Queenstown, and New York. These conveyed a sense of both urgency and surprise, as though Cunard had never expected to lose one of its great ships and to actually have to use its passenger records to tally the living and dead.

  MAY 10: “DID GUY LEWIN ACTUALLY SAIL LUSITANIA.”

  MAY 10: “NAME CHARLES WARMEY APPEARS ON SECOND CLASS SHOULD THIS BE CHARLES WARING WHICH DOES NOT APPEAR—REPLY QUICKLY.”

  MAY 11: “DID F A TWIGG ACTUALLY EMBARK LUSITANIA.”

  MAY 11: “GIVE US FULL CHRISTIAN NAMES AND CLASSES ALL PASSENGERS NAMED ADAMS WHO SAILED LUSITANIA—VERY URGENT.”

  A few passengers reported to be dead were in fact alive, but more often those reported alive were dead. “Report of Mr. Bilicke as survivor is erroneous,” U.S. consul Frost wrote in a terse telegram to Ambassador Page in London. A five-year-old boy, Dean Winston Hodges, was at first said to be safe, but then came a cable from Cunard to its New York office, “Regret no trace of Master Dean Winston Hodges.” His body proved to be among those taken aboard the rescue ship Flying Fish. Names of the dead were misspelled, offering moments of false hope. A man identified as Fred Tyn was in fact Fred Tyers, who had died; Teresa Desley was in fact Teresa Feeley, who perished along with her husband, James. There were two Mrs. Hammonds. One lived; the other—Ogden’s wife—died. Two waiters were named John Leach. One survived, the other did not. A dead passenger named Greenfield was in fact Greenshields.