Dead Wake (35 page)

The ship was still moving but sinking fast, the deck visibly descending.
Lauriat stood on a seat in the lifeboat, intending to go forward to help with the bow. The curved arm of a descending davit struck him from behind and knocked him down. He got up, this time mindful of the davit, and moved forward by stepping from seat to seat, forcing his way through the mass of passengers.

The boat seemed to be full of oars—“an infinite number,” he wrote. He stepped on one. It rolled. He fell.

By the time Lauriat got to his feet, the now partially submerged forward davit was pressing on the bow of the lifeboat and the boat’s stern was rising. It was as though the ship had reached out with a clawed hand to drag the lifeboat down. There was nothing to be done. Lauriat stepped from the boat into the water. He urged the other occupants to do likewise, but few did. The davit gripped the lifeboat and tipped it inward, toward the deck, then pulled it under the water, with women and children and the Dickens
Carol
still aboard.

S
HIPBUILDER
S
AMUEL
K
NOX
came across Paul Crompton, the Philadelphian traveling to England with his wife and six children. Crompton had corralled four of the children and was trying to put a life jacket on the youngest, “a mere baby,” Knox said. One
of Crompton’s older girls could not get her own jacket adjusted properly. With no apparent concern, she asked Knox, “
Please will you show me how to fix this?” Knox did so. The girl thanked him.

N
ORAH
B
RETHERTON
, the Los Angeles woman who had run to rescue her infant daughter, Betty, while leaving her three-year-old son asleep in her cabin, carried the baby up a stairway crammed with passengers. She forced the girl into the arms of a passing stranger, a man, then turned and went back down to get her son.

The interior stairs were empty of people. She ran. Smoke came through the floors of the corridor and the cabin itself. She grabbed the boy, Paul, and carried him up to B Deck, to the starboard side, which by this point was canted so steeply that another woman, also holding a small boy, slid past along the deck, on her back.

Bretherton came to a lifeboat in process of being lowered. A male passenger told her she could not get in, that the boat was too full, but a friend of Bretherton’s, already in the boat, persuaded the other passengers to allow her aboard.

Bretherton had no idea where her baby was. On the way to the lifeboat, she had seen the man to whom she had given the child, but the man’s arms were empty.

T
HEODATE
P
OPE
struggled to come to the surface but found herself pressed against a barrier of some sort. Something made of wood. She swallowed salt water.

“
I opened my eyes,” she wrote, “and through the green water I could see what I was being dashed up against; it looked like the bottom and keel of one of the ship’s boats.” She was certain death was near, she wrote, and “committed myself to God’s care in thought—a prayer without words.” Then, something struck her, and she lost consciousness.

She awoke floating on the surface, held up by her life jacket. For a few moments, everything she saw was gray. The limbs of frantic people jostled her. There was screaming and shouting.

Color returned to her vision. A man, “insane with fright,” grabbed her around the shoulders. He had no life jacket. His bulk pushed her downward.

“Oh please don’t,” she said. Then she and the man sank below the surface. She passed out again.

When she regained consciousness, the man was gone and she was afloat. There was sunshine and cerulean sky. The ship was well past, and still moving. The men and women drifting in the sea around her were spaced more widely than before, and they were quieter. Some were alive, some clearly dead. Blood flowed from a gash in one man’s forehead.

An oar floated near. Her life jacket kept her buoyant, but even so she reached for the oar and draped her right foot over the blade. She raised her head to see if help was coming, but saw that none was. “Then I sank back, very relieved in my mind, for I decided it was too horrible to be true and that I was dreaming, and again lost consciousness.”

E
LSEWHERE IN THE SEA
, a kindred soul also lay adrift—Mary Popham Lobb, a British citizen and spiritualist from the island of St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. For her this time in the water was mystical and moving. She found herself drifting farther and farther from the dense mass of bodies and wreckage left behind as the ship slid by. The cries of survivors became faint, as did the clatter of oars and the shouts of men in boats.

She gave up all hope of rescue and told herself the time to cross over had come, but another voice within told her, no, this was not her moment. “
The gulls were flying overhead,” she wrote, “and I remember noticing the beauty of the blue shadows which the sea throws up to their white feathers: they were happy and alive and made me feel rather lonely; my thoughts went to my people, looking forward to seeing me, and at that moment having tea in the garden. The idea of their grief was unbearable; I had to cry a little.”

G
RACE
F
RENCH
, having jumped without a life jacket, sank deep into the sea. “
It got blacker and blacker, until it became calm and peaceful and I thought I must be in heaven,” she wrote. “The next thing I saw was the water getting lighter and lighter until I popped to the surface and grabbed hold of a plank of wood and it helped keep me afloat. With that I felt I was saved; I grabbed hold of a lifejacket which had a dead young man in it. We floated together for a while until a big wave washed him away.”

D
WIGHT
H
ARRIS
swam from the ship. “
I had no feeling of fear when I went overboard.” He felt as comfortable as if he had simply entered a swimming pool—so composed that when he came across a floating book, he picked it up and examined it.

The
Lusitania
moved past. “I was carried by the whole length of the ship and saw everything that happened!—The first life boat (starboard side) was in the water with only two sailors in it. They called to me to swim to it, but I kept on. The second boat was suspended and hanging straight down, the ropes at one end having jammed; the third and fourth boats were crowded with people.”

He saw that the sea was now level with the bridge. As the ship passed him, its stern rose into the air.

F
OR THE FAMILY
of Joseph Frankum, of Birmingham, England, traveling with his wife, three-year-old daughter, and two sons, ages five and seven, these last moments were terrifying. Frankum gathered them all in a lifeboat on the port side, at the stern. The boat still hung from its davits, but Frankum hoped it would float free when the sea arrived.

The view downhill was of chaos and death, punctuated with eruptions of black smoke as boilers exploded in succession. The mounting air pressure in the hull caused portholes to burst and seams and apertures to howl.

But, strangely, there was also singing. First “Tipperary,” then “Rule, Britannia!” Next came “Abide with Me,” but it was so moving
and so sad that women began to cry, and the singers switched to “Pull for the Shore,” and then another round of “Rule, Britannia!”

Frankum said, “
I clung to my wife and children and held them tight.”

M
ARGARET
M
ACKWORTH
stayed with the ship, on the boat deck, next to Dorothy Conner. Conner’s brother-in-law was somewhere below, looking for life jackets. A strange calm settled over the deck. People moved “
gently and vaguely,” Mackworth recalled. “They reminded one of a swarm of bees who do not know where the queen has gone.”

For a moment, the ship seemed about to right itself. Word spread that the crew had at last been able to close its watertight bulkheads and that the danger of sinking was past. Mackworth and Conner shook hands. “
Well, you’ve had your thrill all right,” Mackworth said.

“I never want another,” Conner said.

Conner’s brother-in-law returned. He had been unable to reach his cabin because of water in the corridor but had managed to find jackets elsewhere. The three put them on. Mackworth released the hook on her skirt, to make it easier to take off later if the need arose.

The ship’s list returned, steeper than before. Seventeen minutes had elapsed since impact. They resolved to jump. The idea terrified Mackworth. She chided herself on this, “telling myself how ridiculous I was to have physical fear of the jump when we stood in such grave danger as we did.”

Conner and her brother-in-law moved to the rail. Mackworth held back.

Conner wrote, “
One gets very close in three minutes at such a time, and just before we jumped I grabbed her hand and squeezed to try and encourage her.”

But Mackworth stayed behind. Her last recollection was of water up to her knees, and the ship sliding away, pulling her down.

T
HEODORE AND
Belle Naish, the Kansas City couple who just hours earlier had been admiring the sunrise from the ship’s top deck, also stood at the rail. They wore life jackets and stood arm in arm, talking quietly. Having watched one lifeboat dump its occupants into the sea, they made no effort to get into another. A member of the crew told them, “
She’s all right, she will float for an hour.” But Belle did not believe him. She’d been watching the rail and the horizon line. The changing differential told her the ship was sinking quickly. She said, “We’ll be gone in a minute.”

She took her arm from Theodore’s, so as not to drag him under. “We watched the water, talked to each other; there seemed to be a great rush, a roar and a splintering sound, then the lifeboat or something swung over our heads.” The boat struck her and cut her scalp. She held out an arm to protect Theodore. A sudden shift in the deck brought water to her armpits. “It seemed as if everything in the universe ripped and tore.”

And then she was deep underwater—by her estimate, 20 or 30 feet. She looked up and saw the brilliant blue of the sky through the water. “
I thought about how wondrously beautiful the sunlight and water were from below the surface,” she wrote. She was not afraid. “I thought, ‘Why, this is like being in my grandmother’s feather bed.’ I kicked, and rose faster.”

Her head struck something, and continued to bump against it. “I put up my right hand, saw the blue sky and found myself clinging to the bumper of life boat 22.” A man reached for her. She was so grateful she asked him to write his name on the inside of her shoe, “lest in the experience to follow I might forget.”

The name was Hertz, for Douglas Hertz, a young man who was returning to England to join the South Lancashire Regiment, after living for a time in St. Louis.
The sinking crowned a troubled period for Hertz. In 1913, he had lost his wife in a train wreck on their honeymoon; that same year, his mother had died in a house fire.

Belle saw no sign of her husband.

A
FTER HELPING
to launch a starboard boat, No. 13, Seaman Leslie Morton went to help with a second, also on the starboard side. He and another sailor, under the direction of a petty officer, struggled to help passengers get across the gap between the ship and the boat. The final angle of list, by Morton’s estimate, was 30 degrees. Sixty passengers made it. Asked later how this feat had been achieved, Morton answered, “
If you had to jump six or seven feet, or certainly drown, it is surprising what ‘a hell of a long way’ even older people can jump.”