Authors: Erik Larson
She revived quickly and brightened the spirits aboard with her optimism and cheer and “her bright talk,” Lauriat wrote.
The boat was nearly full when Lauriat steered it past a dense jam of floating debris. “
I heard a woman’s voice say, in just as natural a tone of voice as you would ask for another slice of bread and butter, ‘Won’t you take me next? You know I can’t swim.’ ” Lauriat looked over and saw a woman’s head protruding from the
wreckage, her long hair splayed over the surrounding debris. She was wedged so tightly that she could not raise her arms. Even so, she had a “half smile” on her face, Lauriat recalled, “and was placidly chewing gum.”
The men pulled her in, and set off rowing toward the lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, a dozen miles away.
E
VEN THOUGH
the sinking had occurred so near the Irish coast, there was still no sign that rescuers were approaching. Those passengers in the water came to terms with their situations in varying ways. Rev. Henry Wood Simpson, of Rossland, British Columbia, put himself in God’s hands, and from time to time repeated one of his favorite phrases, “
Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire.” He said later he knew he would survive—“It is too long a story to tell how I knew”—and that this gave him a sense of calm even when at one point he was underwater, asking himself, “What if I don’t come out?”
He did come out. His life jacket held him in a position of comfort, “and I was lying on my back smiling up at the blue sky and the white clouds, and I had not swallowed much sea water either.” For him, these moments in the water were almost enjoyable—aside from the dead woman who for a time floated beside him. “I found it a most comfortable position,” he said, “and lay there for a bit very happily.”
He pulled the woman’s body to an overturned collapsible and maneuvered her onto its hull, then swam toward another collapsible, this one right-side up and occupied by survivors. There were corpses on this raft as well. An engineer from the ship started singing a hymn, “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow,” Simpson recalled, and noted, “We put a good deal of heart into it.” But upon its conclusion no one tried to sing another. “Then we just waited, hoping that they had been able to get out a wireless for help before she went down. It was beautifully calm, fortunately for us, because a very little would have washed us off. We were better off than the people floating on planks in the water or kept up by
their lifebelts, or than the people in the water-logged boat [nearby], which kept capsizing.”
A porpoise—Simpson called it “a monster porpoise”—surfaced “and played near us, coming up with its shiny black skin and triangular fin showing for a moment.”
An hour passed, then two hours. The sea remained calm; the afternoon light shifted hue. “It was a beautiful sunset,” Simpson recalled, “and all so calm and peaceful.”
S
URVIVORS DRIFTED
—in the water, on boats, on pieces of wreckage—for three hours, in hopes that rescuers were on their way. Had the
Juno
come, the wait would have been far shorter, the chances of survival much higher. But the Admiralty had adopted a harsh calculus, and indeed no one knew whether the submarine was still in the vicinity or not. Some passengers claimed to have seen a periscope after the
Lusitania
sank, and feared the U-boat might even now be among them. As one survivor wrote, “
I was fully expecting the submarine to come up and fire on the Lucy’s boats or wait until the rescue ships came up and then sink them.”
The first sign of rescue was smoke on the horizon, and then came a long, rag-tag armada of torpedo boats and trawlers and small fishing vessels, these more expendable than the large cruiser
Juno
.
Here were the
Brock
,
Bradford
,
Bluebell
,
Sarba
,
Heron
, and
Indian Empire
; the
Julia
,
Flying Fish
,
Stormcock
, and
Warrior
.
In Queenstown, suspense mounted. None of these ships had wireless, wrote Consul Frost: “
No news could be had until they returned.”
O
NCE A LIFEBOAT
was emptied, the seamen aboard rowed back to look for more survivors, but as evening approached the retrieval of corpses began to outpace the rescue of living souls. The last vessel to arrive was a shore-based lifeboat, the
Kezia Gwilt
, with a crew of fifteen. Ordinarily the men would have raised sail to make the journey, but there was so little wind that they realized they
could cover the distance more quickly if they rowed. And so they did—some 14 miles.
“
We did everything we could to reach the place, but it took us at least three and a half hours of hard pulling to get there only in time to pick up dead bodies,” wrote Rev. William Forde, in charge of the lifeboat. There, in that gorgeous dusk, they moved through the wreckage. “It was a harrowing sight to witness,” Forde wrote, “the sea was strewn with bodies floating about, some with lifebelts on, some holding on to pieces of rafts, all dead.”
L
AURIAT AND COMPANY
rowed their collapsible boat 2 miles until they came upon a small sail-rigged fishing boat, known in these waters as a fishing smack.
As they approached the vessel, Margaret Gwyer, still coated in soot, saw her husband standing at its rail and called to him. His expression, Lauriat wrote, was “perfectly blank.” He had no idea who this blackened young woman could be.
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.
D
WIGHT
H
ARRIS
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.
T
HEODATE
P
OPE
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.
L
ATER
,
A WOMAN WHO CLAIMED TO BE
S
CHWIEGER
’
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.
T
HE 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
.
H
IS 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.”