Authors: Greg King
Lauriat and Brooks finally managed to pull some oars from the flotsam before returning to rescue survivors. It was, Lauriat remembered, “simply awful” as they approached the scene. Many kept afloat by their lifebelts were already dead. One woman pulled in, he recalled, was “placidly chewing gum” and smilingly asked to be taken aboard as she couldn’t swim. Lauriat wondered how they could possibly take in another person, but the woman solved his dilemma by simply offering to float alongside holding an oar. No one knew if
Lusitania
had managed to send out a distress call, but everyone could see the Irish coast in the distance, and Lauriat thought that they should aim their boat toward the lighthouse atop the Old Head of Kinsale.
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It seemed so close, just eleven miles away, yet the banded lighthouse was, for the desperate and freezing survivors, so far away. Beyond the tall cliffs and green hills, out of sight around a bluff, lay Queenstown, its picturesque shops and quaint houses standing in clusters on a hillside rising from the harbor. That placid, sunny afternoon,
Lusitania
’s distress signal sent shockwaves over the little town. Vice Admiral Sir Charles Coke, in charge of a small fleet of cruisers and patrol boats, ordered them out. At first, he included the cruiser HMS
Juno,
which could make 18 knots and thus reach any survivors quickly; then, worried that it might fall victim to a submarine, Coke ordered it back into port.
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Instead, a ramshackle collection of slower vessels—fishing trawlers, steamers, tugboats, and tenders—sailed away toward
Lusitania
’s last known position.
It took several hours for this flotilla to reach the band of survivors. “Gradually,” recalled Oliver Bernard, “smoke appeared on the horizon” as vessels neared.
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“We all shouted ourselves hoarse,” wrote Phoebe Amory. Soon, she was aboard “a dirty, smelly, fishing craft, but never did a ship of any description look so good to me.” Wearing only her nightgown, shoes, and raincoat, Phoebe’s “teeth chattered and my limbs shook.” She was given tea to warm her, and soon felt “in fairly good shape.”
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Robert Holt waited on an overturned boat for several hours, scanning the horizon for signs of rescue. When he finally spotted a distant curl of steam, he “tied handkerchiefs to an oar and attracted their attention.”
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One by one, the cold and dazed passengers who had managed to survive their ordeal were plucked from lifeboats, collapsible boats, and the sea: Warren Pearl and, separately, his wife, Amy; Thomas Home; William Meriheina; Leslie Morton; Virginia Loney; Annie Adams; Robert Timmis; Charles Jeffery; Gladys Bilicke; Dorothy Conner; Josephine Brandell; William Adams; Frederick Orr-Lewis and his valet, George Slingsby; Josephine Burnside; Lott Gadd; Alice Lines and the two youngest Pearl children; James Houghton; Carl Foss; Robert Holt; and Laura Ryerson.
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Rescued by the trawler
Julia,
Belle Naish found herself called below to look after young Robert Kay, who had developed a high fever and was suffering from measles.
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The already hefty Isaac Lehmann wore clothing so waterlogged that it took six men to haul him into a rescue boat.
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“The first thing I did was to make for the fire room,” remembered Michael Byrne when he was hauled aboard the
Flying Fish
. He “stripped off and hung my clothing on the furnace doors, and helped to fire the boat so as to keep my blood in circulation.” The man who had brought three hundred cigars and eleven pounds of tobacco on his voyage most wanted a smoke; when he put his hand into his coat pocket he pulled out damp tobacco.
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While some survivors fled to the warmth of cabins and shed their waterlogged clothing, others stubbornly stood on deck clad in their wet garments and lifebelts, afraid that they would be torpedoed again.
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Pulled from her raft, Angela Papadopoulos drank a glass of sherry before following an officer to a cabin to change “my shabby, soaked clothes.” A sailor handed her the only dry clothing at hand—his trousers and sweater—which she appreciatively donned.
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Ian Holbourn long remembered the “heartrending” sobs of mothers crying for their lost children as his rescue boat steamed toward Queenstown.
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Jessie Taft Smith was aboard
Stormcock
when it cruised into the harbor at Queenstown a few minutes past eight; six hours had passed since
Lusitania
made her final plunge, and darkness was falling. There now began, as American consul in Queenstown Wesley Frost recalled, “a ghastly procession” of rescue ships. People armed with flaming torches lined the waterfront, watching as ship after ship came into view, discharging “bruised and shuddering women, crippled and half-clothed men, and a few wide-eyed children whose minds were still revolving blankly this new experience.” Frost watched in horror as “piles of corpses” began to litter the quays as the hours passed.
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The fishing trawler
Julia
brought a barely conscious Theodate Pope into Queenstown. When the vessel encountered her floating in the sea, she was unresponsive, and sailors used grappling hooks to pull her aboard. Believing that she was dead, they cast her into a pile of corpses on the deck. Wandering the vessel, a shivering Belle Naish came upon this grim mound and knelt beside Theodate; the right side of face was covered with severe bruises and her body “felt like a sack of cement,” so stiff was it from being immersed in the water. Belle thought she detected breathing, and quickly called over two sailors, begging them to perform artificial respiration on her. The men sliced off Theodate’s wet clothing with an old carving knife and set to work; Belle insisted that they continue their efforts.
After two hours, Theodate’s breathing became steady, and she was wrapped in a blanket and carried to the captain’s cabin. Although she was “shaking from head to foot in a very violent chill,” Theodate was alive.
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There were equally dramatic scenes aboard other vessels that Friday evening. British steamer
Westborough,
flying the Greek flag and disguised with the name
Katrina,
plucked numerous survivors from the water, including Harold Boulton, the Lassetters, Rita Jolivet, and Howard Fisher. Fireman John O’Connell gingerly helped the injured Lady Allan.
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As she came aboard, a shivering Marguerite Allan looked at O’Connell and said, “I like you. What for, I don’t know,” before lapsing back into semiconsciousness.
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Howard Fisher tried to assist as many of the injured as he could. One member of
Lusitania
’s crew was pulled aboard with his arm nearly severed by the explosions. Fisher watched as a doctor performed an emergency amputation.
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An old side-wheel paddle steamer formerly used to ferry passengers from Queenstown to ships waiting at anchor in the harbor,
Flying Fish
came in shortly after nine that evening. Many of those aboard, like Charles Lauriat, James Brooks, and Ogden Hammond, had been transferred from smaller rescue boats. Before abandoning his waterlogged collapsible, Lauriat had pulled an oarlock off as a souvenir of the sinking.
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Flying Fish,
Lauriat remembered, “was positively slippery with fish scales and the usual dirt of fishermen, but the deck of that boat, under our feet, felt as good as the front halls of our own homes.” Seeing that many people had removed outer garments before jumping from
Lusitania
and now were shivering in the twilight, he took off his sweater and handed it to a man clad in trousers and an undershirt, while his coat went to a lady who sat numbly on deck. Although they were safe,
Flying Fish
’s passengers faced another ordeal: when the vessel reached the harbor, the captain refused to disembark any passengers until he had made a report.
Lauriat led his fellow survivors to the side of the boat and lowered the gangplank, but a sailor standing guard at the dock tried to halt the operation.
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Lauriat pulled out a revolver and waved it in the air. In “language decidedly to the point,” fellow survivor Oliver Bernard recalled, Lauriat ordered the man to let the passengers off the boat.
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The sailor complied.
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Survivors crowded the quays, watching, waiting, hoping, and praying to see the faces of loved ones each time a new vessel drew up alongside. David Thomas had not seen his daughter, Margaret, since the explosion. Now safely ashore, the agnostic Thomas found himself looked after by a Catholic priest, who took him off to dinner and, against the crusty Welshman’s protests, made him drink several snifters of brandy. Thomas wanted to wire his wife, but he had still had no news of Margaret. Finally, he dispatched a telegram: “Landed safely, Margaret not yet, but several boats still to come.” Then he wandered back to the quay and waited in the darkness enveloping Queenstown.
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Margaret was safe, carried with George Kessler, Albert Bestic, and Captain Turner aboard the steamer
Bluebell
toward Queenstown. One survivor had looked out over the horizon and seen “a young woman, sitting in a wicker chair, serenely riding the waves.”
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Somehow, in her unconscious state, her body had floated into the chair, which kept her above the water and made her visible to rescuers. She was so cold and unresponsive when pulled from the sea that the sailors assumed she was dead and laid her on deck with a pile of bodies. One sailor, though, looked her over, declaring, “I rather think there’s some life in this woman. You’d better try and see.” When she finally came to, her clothing was so heavy with water that three men were needed to help her below to the captain’s cabin. She was still in a daze.
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“You are better now,” a sailor whispered as Margaret struggled to understand what had happened and where she now was.
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“I had a vague idea that something had happened,” she recalled, “but I thought that I was still on the deck of the
Lusitania,
and I was vaguely annoyed that my own stewardess should not be attending to me instead of some unknown sailor.” Her entire body “was shaking violently” and her teeth “were chattering like castanets.” In the “delicious” warmth of the cabin, she gradually remembered what had happened. Several other survivors filled the cabin. “Almost all of us down there,” Margaret said, “were a little drunk with the heat and the light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive.”
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“The reporters will be after me to get information,” Captain Turner had confided to Kessler aboard
Bluebell,
“but I shall tell them nothing.”
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He now sat in stony silence as one survivor, thought to be Trixie Witherbee, described how she had lost her child when a boat capsized. His death, she insisted, had been due to the lack of discipline and organization on the ship, and she told Turner that she meant to say so publicly. A sailor tending to Lady Mackworth whispered that the woman was hysterical, but Margaret, “fresh from the incompetent muddle on the
Lusitania
’s deck,” thought that she was “the one person on board who was not.” It was after eleven that night when
Bluebell
steamed into the harbor at Queenstown. Margaret was naked but for a blanket wrapped around her and the captain’s slippers, and borrowed a long coat when they landed. “I must have been pretty weak,” she recalled as she reached the gangway, “for I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl on to it. At the other end of the gangway, my father was waiting.”
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Rising along the steep, cobblestone streets ringing its harbor, Queenstown was a quiet, almost serene little town. In 1849, Queen Victoria had visited the town then known as Cove; it was the first time a British monarch had ever set foot on Irish soil, and Cove was renamed Queenstown to mark the occasion. American consul Wesley Frost thought it was a “beautiful little city,” its streets filled with rustic laborers, women in shawls, and picturesque donkey carts.
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