Authors: Greg King
The suction had also twice pulled Rita Jolivet beneath the waves; when she finally rose to the surface,
Lusitania
had disappeared. She still had her pearl-handled pistol: looking around at the sea filled with wreckage and struggling survivors, she apparently decided that immediate death was better than losing consciousness and drowning.
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She later told Harold Boulton that she managed to retrieve the pistol but when she pulled the trigger, immersion in the water caused the gun to fail.
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She swam to a nearby boat, clinging to the sides with other passengers as she awaited rescue.
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“It got pitch black,” Annie Adams remembered, as she was pulled beneath the surface when
Lusitania
sank. When she finally rose again, she saw sunshine but no trace of her husband, Henry. She spotted what was presumably an overturned collapsible boat nearby and begged to be picked up but the men refused; only when a woman aboard insisted did they stop and haul Annie out of the sea. But it was overcrowded and kept capsizing. “Each time,” she said, “it was less buoyant, and almost every time it overturned one or more of the poor wretches would disappear. Finally the other woman went down.” Annie managed to stay aboard by using “my gymnastic knowledge,” crawling and twisting as the boat bobbed and turned. Finally, when only a handful of survivors were left, the boat sank beneath them and Annie drifted off into unconsciousness as she floated over the water.
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Ian Holbourn continued his desperate search for Avis Dolphin. He swam toward several people in the water but found that they were dead. As he made his way through wreckage and bodies, he could hear the “terrible” shouts for help all around him.
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He swam to a nearby lifeboat; most of those aboard seemed dead; he asked to be hauled in, but those inside refused, nor would they attempt to save any of the dying passengers around them. After more than an hour of gripping lines at the side of the boat, Holbourn was exhausted, and asked if the officer in charge would hold on to his hand so that he would not sink. The officer refused, saying that holding another man’s hand would make him “uncomfortable.”
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Avis, meanwhile, had “lost sight of Hilda and Miss Smith” as she was dragged down with the ship. “I was under water for about a minute, then floated around for a few seconds.” Finally, she spotted a nearby collapsible boat and swam to it. Several men took their knives and cut away the canvas top so that people could climb aboard. Now out of the water, but sitting in her drenched clothing, Avis shivered. To get warm, “I stood up and exercised a little,” being careful not to tip the precariously balanced boat.
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Many of those aboard lifeboats found themselves in unexpectedly perilous positions. A survivor opened one of the kegs of water stowed aboard and found that it “was unfit for human consumption … a third full of a brown, stinking fluid.”
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Charles Lauriat swam to a nearby collapsible boat floating empty on the surface. Working with several other survivors including James Brooks, he managed to cut the covering loose and tried to raise the canvas sides. They found the wooden braces broken and the iron ribs so rusted that it was nearly impossible to make it seaworthy; there were not even any oars aboard.
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Lauriat was “disgusted” that
Lusitania
’s captain and crew had deemed such a boat ready in case of emergency.
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George Kessler, hurled into the water when his lifeboat overturned, had been pulled under when
Lusitania
sank. “I thought I was a goner,” he recalled, but he finally managed to kick his way back to the surface. He floated in his lifebelt to a collapsible boat and helped raise the canvas sides. Water filled the bilge. It was “all that human effort could do to keep her afloat,” Kessler remembered. Soon the boat capsized, spilling its occupants back into the sea. They somehow managed to right it and climb back in, but water continued to seep into the vessel. “Although we bailed feverishly, we could not get the water out,” and it capsized repeatedly, tearing Kessler’s legs as he continually scraped against the boat. Each time it was righted, fewer people climbed back in; the “agony and suffering,” Kessler said, were “indescribable.” Within a few hours, only three of those originally aboard remained. The rest had perished in the water.
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Charles Jeffery “sank twice, but I had a chance in the meantime to get my lungs full of air.” The second time he was pulled under, he remembered, he “gave up hope,” but somehow managed to swim back up to the surface and remain there, clinging to a partially submerged collapsible boat.
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Pulled down “again and again,” Thomas Home was exhausted by the time he finally reached the surface; although he swam to a bit of wreckage, he was so weak that he “felt I could not last.” Finally, he spotted a dead body nearby, kept afloat by a lifebelt. He swam over to the corpse, unfastened the belt, and managed to pull it around his shoulders just before he passed out.
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Carl Foss reached a half-filled collapsible boat but “didn’t like the look of things.”
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“There were several women on it,” he recalled, “screaming wildly and the raft was rocking heavily because they would not keep still.” Although he “shouted to the women to keep quiet,” they were, he said, “so hysterical that they took no notice and the craft turned turtle, throwing them all into the water.”
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He finally swam several hundred feet to another collapsible. Foss was so exhausted that he could not even clamber aboard, and had to be pulled from the water.
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Theodate Pope had been pulled down with the ship, “washed and whirled up against wood”—one of
Lusitania
’s lifeboats. After swallowing the salty water, she closed her eyes. “This is, of course, the end of life for me,” she thought. She felt “no special discomfort nor anguish of mind.” She was happy that she had made a will, and pondered the buildings she had designed as she “committed myself to God’s care.” A piece of wreckage knocked her unconscious, but she floated to the surface: “my stiff straw hat and my hair probably saved me,” she later wrote. When she opened her eyes, she found herself surrounded by “hundreds of frantic, screaming, shouting humans in this gray and watery inferno.” A desperate man, with “panic in his eyes” and without a lifebelt, grabbed at her. “Oh, please don’t!” she cried as she was dragged down and again lost consciousness. Some minutes later, she awoke to find herself floating on her back, beneath “the brilliant sunshine.” The water, she said, “felt warm,” and she noticed that the gaps between clusters of survivors had grown wider. She reached for an oar, pushing one end toward an elderly man with a large gash on his forehead floating nearby. Her wet clothing continually threatened to drag Theodate down, and she was forced to throw one leg over the oar to stay afloat. Thinking her experience was “too horrible to be true,” she again passed into unconsciousness.
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Dorothy Conner found herself entangled in ropes when she entered the sea with her brother-in-law, Howard Fisher, and quickly lost consciousness as she was sucked below. She was “quite calm under the water. The thought of God came to me,” she recalled, “how at times like this, He was everyone’s God, a living, warm, all pervading presence.” She eventually floated up unconscious near an overturned boat and was pulled out of the water.
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Fisher, too, had been pulled down. “It is just a question of how long you can hold your breath,” he told himself. Finally, he surfaced and swam to a lifeboat, where he tended to the wounded. He was annoyed, though, at having “to share my pipe with two dirty sailors.”
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William Meriheina awoke to find “bright sun shining in my eyes. It was cold, and I felt stunned, but I struck out for an overturned lifeboat.” When he reached the craft, another survivor grabbed him around the neck and pushed him away, pulling them both under. Finally, Meriheina managed to clamber up on the overturned keel and helped his assailant aboard. While awaiting rescue, Meriheina pulled out his fountain pen and, using waterlogged postcards in his pocket, wrote two brief messages: “Ship sunk,” read the first. “Seventy of us on a raft. Believe the lost will amount to half our passengers. May we all be happy in our destiny.” His second was more philosophical, ending with the hope that “the lives of the lost ones will pay the score.”
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Margaret Mackworth’s wrist had been caught on a rope attached to the sinking ship, leaving a scar that she bore for the rest of her life. “It was very dark,” she recalled, “nearly black.” This, she said, was “the worst moment of terror, the only moment of acute terror that I knew.” She struggled toward the surface and found a board several feet long that, together with her lifebelt, helped her float. “Slightly stupefied,” she saw that she was part of “a large, round floating island composed of people and debris” so immense that she could scarcely see the water between them. A white-faced man grabbed the other end of her board; although sure it could not support both of them, she “did not feel justified in objecting.” Every few minutes, his hands inched toward her; although it was an effort to speak, a frightened Margaret repeatedly warned him away. Soon, he drifted off into the sea. As she floated, she heard prayers over the water in “a curious, unemotional monotone.” She tried to swim to one of the distant lifeboats but her legs were numb and she refused to let go of the board. “There was,” she remembered, “no acute feeling of fear while one was floating in the water. I can remember feeling thankful that I had not been drowned underneath but had reached the surface safely, and thinking that even if the worst happened there could be nothing unbearable to go through now that my head was above the water.” Except for the cold, she felt almost comfortable; once, she looked up at the “sun and pale blue sky” and wondered “whether I had reached Heaven without knowing it.” Dazed and exhausted, she faded into unconsciousness.
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Captain William Turner had remained with his ship until it sank beneath him. Washed from
Lusitania
by the surging sea, he saw his vessel disappear into a swirl of wreckage. While fighting to stay afloat, Turner also battled seagulls. In horrific scenes, he saw the birds swoop down on helpless survivors, attacking and pecking out their eyes.
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He finally managed to climb aboard an overturned boat with several others. “Some of you men will have to get off here,” Turner told them. Several passengers went over the side; Turner “stayed on, and made no attempt to leave.”
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Once the cries for help waned, the sound of singing filled the air. Floating beneath the expansive blue sky, survivors tried to keep spirits up with renditions of “Tipperary,” “Abide with Me, Lord,” and, more ominously, “Nearer My God to Thee.”
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Soon, unconsciousness and death took hold. The water was fifty-five degrees, and hypothermia soon set in.
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Those fortunate enough to be in the six lifeboats that cleared the ship fared better than their fellow passengers drifting with the tide, soaked to the skin and clinging desperately to any floating object. After an hour or two, many of those struggling in the sea lost feeling in their arms and legs; disoriented and exhausted, they faded into unconsciousness and slipped beneath the surface. Carl Foss saw a woman float up, holding her dead infant, as he helped her onto his collapsible boat. She stared at her child’s face for a long time, and finally said quietly, “Let me bury my baby.” She gently placed it in the water and watched as the tiny body sank beneath the waves.
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A few of the lifeboats transferred their occupants to those only half full and returned to rescue survivors. By the time Josephine Brandell was pulled into a boat, she was so cold and unresponsive that the men thought she was dead.
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The men who rescued Josephine Burnside from the water at first thought that she must have been a member of the crew, so soaked in oil and soot was she—at least until they saw her jewelry shining in the sunlight.
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Lott Gadd took charge of one boat and rowed back to the debris field, as did George Kessler, Albert Bestic, and Leslie Morton.
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Many times, though, the boats rowed to clusters of people bobbing in the water only to find them dead. One man spotted something flashing in the distance and rowed toward it: it was an immense diamond ring on the stiff fingers of a dead American passenger.
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