Authors: Greg King
In the last few decades, it has become fashionable to treat Turner as a victim, a good-natured, crusty old salt who did his best when faced with tragedy. Yet the same man who so eagerly condemned Captain Edward Smith in the case of
Titanic
likewise ignored warnings and advice, and abandoned common sense. He ran his ship at a lower speed, close to land, and in a straight line, despite instructions from the Admiralty. His negligence was astonishing. Schwieger fired the lethal torpedo; the Admiralty created the tragic conditions that made the disaster inevitable; but Turner, obstinate, convinced of his own judgment, and unwilling to adjust to changing circumstances, helped weave the terrible threads into an ultimately lethal tapestry.
* * *
Battered and torn,
Lusitania
today rests on her starboard side some three hundred feet below the Irish Sea, wrapped for eternity in a grave of shifting dark green water and nestled in deep silt that conceals her remaining secrets. Fishing nets provide her burial shroud, weaving and waving gently in the current. Like carrion, maritime salvagers have picked apart her once graceful body: her whistle is now gone, along with three of her four immense bronze propellers; the telegraph from her bridge; the bell from her crow’s nest; and two of her anchors. Her proud bow, pointing northeast toward the coast some eleven miles distant, rises from the silt, twisted at an angle from a hull broken amidships. Her tall funnels long ago disintegrated, their positions marked by steam pipes stretched across the ocean floor. Gashes, torn plating, and open wounds dot the length of her hull, the result of depth charges dropped by the Royal Navy in World War II. Why would the Royal Navy bomb what was, after all, a maritime war grave, still entombing hundreds of passengers and crew? To prevent German U-boats from lurking among the wreckage goes one explanation; to provide target practice on test runs asserts another.
Today the area around the wreck is littered with unexploded mines, a powerful deterrent to anyone intent on probing her ruins.
(
93
)
A century beneath the Irish Sea has played havoc with
Lusitania
: her decks and superstructure long ago slid onto the ocean bed “as if a tall house of cards had collapsed.”
(
94
)
Here and there, a piece of colorful decorative tile, a window filigree, a stretch of decking, the ghostly outline of her name—these images loom out of the ghostly, perpetual darkness, haunting reminders of her former glory. But the grand lady is rapidly fading, rusting away into her eternal maritime grave. Soon, the once proud
Lusitania
will crumble to unrecognizable oblivion.
Abbreviations and archival references used within the Notes:
Bailey and Ryan Archive: The Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan Archive, at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Includes transcripts of Mayer interrogatories, oral arguments, testimony, trial, and opinion; Mersey testimony, in camera testimony, and opinion; and documents from the Public Records Office.
Boulton, CBC: Interview with Harold Boulton, 1965, CBC Radio Archives, Toronto, Ontario.
Hoehling and Hoehling Archive: A. A. and Mary Hoehling Archive,
Lusitania
Collection, MS 45, at the Library, Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia. Includes correspondence with survivors, newspaper clippings and accounts, and other data collected for their book
The Last Voyage of the Lusitania
.
Mayer: Interrogatories, Oral Arguments, Testimony, Trial, and Opinion of the Honorable Justice Julius M. Mayer in the Matter of the Petition of the Cunard Steamship Company, Owners of Steamship
Lusitania,
for Limitation of Liability, United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Copies are in the Bailey and Ryan Archive.
Mersey: Loss of the Steamship
Lusitania,
Shipping Casualties, British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, Wreck Commissioners’ Court, Central Hall, Westminster, Proceedings on a Formal Investigation Ordered by the Board of Trade, before the Right Honorable Lord Mersey, Wreck Commissioner of the United Kingdom, et al., Public Proceedings, In Camera Hearings, and Report. Copies are in the Bailey and Ryan Archive.
NARA: National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, Maryland: Includes archives of the Department of State, dispatches from American Queenstown consul Wesley Frost; telegrams from survivors; queries from relatives of those aboard
Lusitania;
and passenger accounts of the sinking. Most
Lusitania
files are in 341.111 and 841.857, grouped under 197 and 198
Lusitania
.
Michael Poirier: Private collection, provided by
Lusitania
historian Michael Poirier to the authors. Includes unpublished accounts and letters by survivors, official documents, statements, and newspaper clippings.
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