Authors: Greg King
“Oh God! Save me!” someone cried before sinking beneath the waves.
(
14
)
When Virginia Loney rose again to the surface after her lifeboat capsized, she saw that
Lusitania
had disappeared. “People were struggling in the water all around me,” she remembered. Young and healthy, Virginia had learned to swim at her parents’ estate in New York, and now kicked her way across the water, to be pulled aboard another lifeboat.
(
15
)
Laura Ryerson, too, escaped the suction when Lifeboat No. 14 capsized, and managed to clear the crowd of struggling survivors to reach another boat. A hole in one end, Laura recalled, continually filled it with water, forcing her and a few others back into the sea, where they clung desperately to the side.
(
16
)
“As I sank,” said James Houghton, “I was struck by some wreckage, but came to almost immediately. As I was whirled about in the whirlpool created by the sinking ship, I escaped death by an inch at least a dozen times.”
(
17
)
After being struck by wreckage, and “weak from loss of blood,” he managed to pull himself aboard a nearby raft; he looked around but he could find no trace of Marie Depage or Richard Freeman.
(
18
)
George Vernon, Houghton said, “lost his reason altogether” in the wake of the sinking; before anyone could stop him, Houghton remembered, Vernon plunged into the water and drowned himself before their horrified eyes.
(
19
)
“I went down, and thought the world had come to an end,” Josephine Eaton Burnside said. “Soon, I found myself on the surface again, clinging to a rope. I cannot swim, and I was only partly conscious. Finally, I grasped the side of a capsized boat.”
(
20
)
Isaac Lehmann surfaced amid “hundreds of people struggling in the water, praying and crying for help. There was wreckage all around.” The sights, he said, “defy description.”
(
21
)
He finally caught hold of an oar, and managed to stay afloat.
(
22
)
Robinson Pirie was pulled below so many times that he “thought I would never get up.” When he finally surfaced, he made his way toward a small box floating in the distance: a teenaged boy lay sprawled across it, and he helped an elderly man with a child in his arms also grab hold as it rolled and bobbed in the waves. For more than an hour, Pirie tried to keep them all balanced, but finally “the man with the child slipped away.” Eventually, he swam to a collapsible boat, waiting for the rescue vessels he prayed would soon appear.
(
23
)
Following his leap into the water, Robert Holt surfaced and clung to an oar. Fearing suction and being a good swimmer, he raced away from the ship only to have another man desperately grab at him. “Seeing he had a belt, I pushed him off,” Holt recalled. He found an air tank floating nearby, but too many people were trying to crowd around it and so Holt swam toward a half-opened collapsible boat, where he saw Dorothy Braithwaite. “It was partly under water, and at any moment seemed as if it would sink.”
(
24
)
“I saw Herbert Holt’s boy,” Frederick Orr-Lewis remembered, “and swam to him,” helping pull him into another nearby collapsible boat.
(
25
)
Robert found not only Orr-Lewis but also Lady Allan aboard. “There was a slight swell, and any moment we thought the slender craft would go over,” Holt remembered.
(
26
)
Marguerite Allan had been injured in the sinking: William Adams thought that she had been struck by a mast as the ship sank. She was now in agony, her spine injured and her collarbone broken.
(
27
)
There was no trace of Anna and Gwendolyn Allan. Swimming away from the wreckage, Harold Boulton was sure that he spotted them in the water. He knew them by sight: he swam close enough to see that they were “very badly mutilated.” Neither, he thought, had drowned, but instead they had been killed when struck by wreckage.
(
28
)
George Slingsby, Orr-Lewis’s valet, had struggled to the surface after being sucked down with the ship and swam toward a nearby boat. “I suddenly began to sink, and I was still on the raft with my head just out of the water when it disappeared,” he wrote, “and I was left struggling in the water.” He grabbed a floating tank, which he shared with one of
Lusitania
’s stewardesses. They balanced on either side of it, with Slingsby holding her hand at the top. After an hour, she let go: “I think the shock killed her, as the water was so cold.” A frightened man swam up to Slingsby and grabbed at his left foot, ripping off his pant leg and pulling him under. He somehow managed to kick him off before drifting into semiconsciousness.
(
29
)
Harold Boulton “went under a long way” when
Lusitania
sank, but quickly rose again to the surface. The lifebelt prevented him from swimming, so he floated on his back in this “struggling mass of humanity fighting for places on bits of wreckage, throwing each other off timber they had struggled to get on, pushing people under water to get out of it themselves like so many wild animals fighting for life, forgetting all chivalry.”
(
30
)
The wreckage was unbelievable: “boats smashed to pieces, utter chaos,” with bodies swirling around in what “looked like a tidal wave.”
(
31
)
He reached a collapsible boat and helped pull in other survivors but all too quickly it was overloaded and threatened to sink. Boulton swam to a large box nearby. Soon, Dorothy Braithwaite floated by. “She had been so badly injured that I wondered if she was still alive,” he remembered; she was bleeding and seemed “very weak.” Sensing that she could not last, Dorothy gave him her name, slipped a small gold ring set with a green stone from her finger, and asked Boulton to give it to her family’s lawyer, saying that she “had tried to die like a brave Canadian girl.” Boulton held her hand; in a few minutes, she gasped for breath and then fell silent. Knowing she was gone, Boulton let go and “a wave carried her away.” He was plagued with guilt that he had “been able to do nothing for her.” Frustrated and overcome with emotion, he took the ring she had given to him and tossed it into the sea—an action that haunted him for the rest of his life.
(
32
)
Soon, Boulton spotted Frederic Lassetter and his mother floating nearby, and called them to his makeshift raft. It was difficult to climb aboard the swaying box, but finally the two young men managed to sit Elisabeth at the center, protected in a cradle formed by their linked arms. It was all they could do to keep her from falling off as waves buffeted the box.
(
33
)
Just when they had worked out the equilibrium, a man bleeding from a gash on his head swam up, shouting, “God, you’ve got to make room for me on that box!” Boulton felt that he was too exhausted to last if he got back into the water, and doing so threatened to upset the entire box. He shouted at Lassetter to grab a nearby oar and drive the man away; the nameless survivor tried several times to grab the box, but Lassetter struck him repeatedly over the head and finally, cursing the group, the man sank beneath the water. “It sounds a cruel thing to have done,” Boulton said, “but it meant three lives against one, and one of the three a woman’s.”
(
34
)
Robert Timmis, caught in “the swirl of water,” was pulled down with the ship as it sank beneath him. “The water was as black as the inside of a cow,” he remembered. One piece of wreckage hit him on the head, and another struck his good eye, leaving him dazed. He managed to swim to the surface—“thirty-one strokes,” he remembered—and made for a large piece of nearby wreckage. The survivors clutching their makeshift raft ordered him away: “I just wasn’t welcome,” Timmis said; finally, after being turned back several more times, he found his own bit of flotsam on which to cling.
(
35
)
Michael Byrne swam through “bodies of infants laid in lifejackets and floating around, their dead, innocent faces looking towards the sky.”
(
36
)
He reached a lifeboat; the men working the oars didn’t know how to row, and thankfully for Byrne, it kept circling in the water. They refused to take him aboard, insisting that the boat was overcrowded already, and so he clutched a rope along the side. Finally, a steward aboard recognized him: “Oh, Mr. Byrne, I’m glad to see you!” he cried out. “I asked him to please pull me in,” Byrne said, “and three of them got me in.” After resting for a few minutes, “I took one of the oars and pulled with the rest of them. The bottom of our boat was lined with unconscious women.”
(
37
)
Dazed, Phoebe Amory found herself floating in a circle of bodies, “their upturned faces white and ghastly.” With her lifebelt on improperly, she found it impossible to swim or turn over, and had to float helplessly on her back as waves “would wash over my face and fill my mouth with water.” She feared that she was “destined to float around until I could no longer survive, and then to die. I could see myself being washed ashore a lifeless corpse, and I believe that had such wild thoughts continued I should have died from the shock of them.” When a lifeboat finally approached, it was so full that she could only be partially pulled in, “so that my head and arms hung into the boat.” Although the lower half of her body was numb, she was, she remembered, “so thankful for having been rescued that I decided to stand the terrible pains that were shooting through my body, until they became absolutely unbearable, and then ask them to please drag me in farther.”
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38
)
Husbands and wives, torn apart by suction and separated in the sinking, desperately searched the water. Gladys Bilicke was dragged down with the ship, and slightly injured. “I fought my way to the surface,” she remembered. “It seemed hours before I came up.” There was no sign of her husband, Albert. She found “a floating spar or piece of timber. Several men were clinging to it and one helped me obtain a hold. Hours passed, and with them one man after another muttered a goodbye and dropped into the water until not one remained. But I believe I was possessed of superhuman strength, and held on.”
(
39
)
Angela Papadopoulos saw her husband, Michael, disappear “into the waves in front of me, and I can still feel his hand slipping from mine.” For hours, she was “at the mercy of the waves” as she swam through a sea clotted with “motionless bodies”; “the only thing I could think of was going home with my children,” she remembered. Finally, she was pulled aboard a collapsible boat, where she spotted an injured Russian man. She’d been to Russia and knew some of the language, and so “tried to hearten him as best I could” while tearing strips from her waterlogged petticoat to help bandage his arm.
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40
)
Ogden Hammond “never thought I would come back” to the surface after being dragged down; when he finally made it, there was no sign of Mary. Hammond was so dazed that he immediately slipped back beneath the waves. He managed to come up again and was hauled into nearby Lifeboat No. 15; there were so many survivors aboard, he recalled, that the edge of the boat was barely six inches above the water.
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41
)
Warren Pearl, after being pulled down by the suction, “floated with the greatest of ease” in his lifebelt.
(
42
)
He eventually found a place in a collapsible boat; his wife, Amy, having suffered a broken arm, had been pulled onto an overturned lifeboat.
(
43
)
Suction from
Lusitania
had separated Belle Naish from her husband, Theodore, and dragged her beneath the surface. “Why, this is like being on grandmother’s feather bed!” she thought as she floated beneath the water.
(
44
)
“I had never before realized how beautiful things were under the water. I could see the rays of the sun slanting through the water and the light was beautiful.” When she finally came to the surface, “the first thing I noticed was the beautiful blue of the sky, and how bright the sun was shining.”
(
45
)
As she surfaced, Belle struck her head on a piece of wreckage. “I got my arms around something, and when I came out of the water, I was clasping the bumper of overturned Lifeboat No. 22.” A nearby man reached out for her, saying, “Give me your hand. My back’s broken, but I’ll do what I can for you.” Although at first she refused, Belle finally allowed herself to be dragged aboard the keel. Nearby was a dead baby someone had plucked from the sea; another man, bleeding profusely from the head, died in front of her. There was also a young boy, Robert Kay, who had been traveling with his mother, now missing, to visit relatives in England. Over the next few hours, Belle tried to keep his spirits up as they drifted through the water.
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46
)