Dead Wake (14 page)

Another arrival was George Kessler, a wealthy wine importer known the world over as the “Champagne King.” Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst, he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as “freak dinners”—perhaps most notably the “Gondola Party” he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.

By far the most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius, whose death in 1899 had left Alfred a rich man. Something of a rake, Alfred was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair, and a taste for expensive suits. He was a welcome presence on board, especially among the women, despite the fact that he was married and carried with him a history of scandal. His first wife, Ellen French, had divorced him in 1908, charging him, as the
New York Times
put it, with “
misconducting himself with an unknown woman” in his private railcar. The woman turned out to be Mary Ruiz, wife of a Cuban diplomat. The scandal drove Ruiz to commit suicide. Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune. She was not on board. Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “
Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the
Titanic
but for one reason or another had changed their minds. Needless to say, Vanderbilt traveled in style, booking one of the
Lusitania
’s “Parlor Suites.” He lodged his valet two doors down the corridor, in an interior room with neither porthole nor bath. Vanderbilt paid for both tickets in cash, $1,001.50, equivalent to over $22,000 in today’s dollars.

Reporters came aboard, as usual, looking to interview famous or notorious passengers, only today their interest was more focused
than usual. It was a mark of the importance of shipping and the frequency with which transatlantic liners called at New York that every newspaper had a “ship news” reporter. Each paper devoted a page to the arrivals and departures of the great liners and to advertisements and schedules for the many shipping lines with piers in the city. It was on these pages that the German warning had appeared in a number of Saturday morning editions.

The ship-news reporters worked out of a shedlike structure near Battery Park, in Lower Manhattan, adjacent to the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry, where a battered green door gave way to a room full of worn desks and telephones used by reporters for a dozen newspapers and one wire service. The reporters tended to favor certain ships, often for intangible reasons. “
Ships do have personalities,” wrote Jack Lawrence, the shipping writer for the
New York Evening Mail
. Some ships “have character and a warm, friendly atmosphere while others are only steel plates riveted around throbbing turbines.” One of the favorites was always the
Lusitania
. The ship invariably provided news, because as the fastest and most luxurious ocean liner still in service it tended to draw the richest, most prominent passengers. Part of the ship’s appeal was also due to the fact that its longtime chief purser, James McCubbin, sixty-two, welcomed the reporters’ attention and directed them to passengers likely to be of interest. As purser, McCubbin had the responsibility to make sure all passengers were tucked into their cabins and berths as quickly as possible, to store their valuables, and—no small thing—to compile their bar bills at the end of the voyage. In the words of the Cunard officers’ manual, he was “
to give satisfaction to all classes of passengers.”

The reporters met the
Lusitania
just before its departures, but also upon arrival, when they would sail out to the quarantine station in New York Harbor. A ritual followed. They gathered in McCubbin’s cabin. He would order a cabin boy to bring some ice, club soda, and a couple of bottles of Cunard Line Scotch. He shut the door and handed out passenger lists. The last such session had taken place the previous week, when the
Lusitania
arrived from
Liverpool, and had brought the reporters some unwelcome news. McCubbin announced that his next voyage, the return to Liverpool departing Saturday, May 1, would be his last crossing. Company rules required that he retire. “
I’m about to become the most useless mortal on earth,” he told the reporters—“the sailor home from the sea.” He called it a joke. “Sailors don’t have homes,” he said, and added, “When a sailor gets so old he can’t work any more they ought to sew him up in a staysail rag and heave him over the side.”

On Saturday morning, reporter Jack Lawrence went aboard as usual, but now with a particular story in mind. He carried with him a copy of the German Embassy’s warning.

Lawrence stopped by the cabin of Alfred Vanderbilt and knocked on the door. Vanderbilt himself opened it, wearing an elegant suit with a pink carnation in one lapel. In the room beyond, his valet was hard at work unpacking a small mountain of baggage. Lawrence had tried to interview Vanderbilt in the past and had typically found it a pointless exercise because the man rarely had much to say. “
Alfred Vanderbilt may have been a riot among the ladies,” Lawrence wrote, “but in the presence of newspapermen he was a shy and shrinking violet.”

Vanderbilt commented that there seemed to be an unusual amount of excitement aboard. “Lots of talk about submarines, torpedoes and sudden death,” Vanderbilt said. “I don’t take much stock in it myself. What would they gain by sinking the
Lusitania
?”

He showed Lawrence a telegram he had received after boarding. “
The
Lusitania
is doomed,” it read. “Do not sail on her.” It was signed “Mort.” Vanderbilt said he didn’t know anyone named Mort but wondered if it might have been an allusion to death. “Probably somebody trying to have a little fun at my expense.”

Out on deck,
Lawrence came across Elbert Hubbard, at this point one of the most famous men in America—the soap salesman turned author who had founded a collective in East Aurora, New York, called the Roycrofters, where men and women built furniture, bound books, made prints, and produced finely crafted goods of leather and metal. As an author, he was best known for his inspirational
book,
A Message to Garcia
, about the value of personal initiative, and for an account of the
Titanic
disaster that centered on one woman’s refusal to enter a lifeboat without her husband; he was headed now to Europe with the goal of interviewing Kaiser Wilhelm. Hubbard was famous as well for coining crisp aphorisms, including “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” He wore a Stetson hat and a flamboyant black cravat—more like a large gift ribbon—and had long flowing hair. When Lawrence approached him, Hubbard was standing beside his wife and eating a large red apple.

Hubbard hadn’t seen the warning. “
When I showed it to him he merely glanced at it and went right on chewing his apple,” Lawrence wrote. Hubbard took another apple out of his pocket and gave it to Lawrence. “Here, have an apple and don’t bother your head about those Potsdam maniacs. They’re all crazy.”

Lawrence pressed him. What if the German navy really was planning an attack?

“What’ll I do?” Hubbard said. “Why, I’ll stay on the ship. I’m too old to go chasing after lifeboats and I never was much of a hand at swimming. No, we’ll stay by the ship.” He turned to his wife. “Won’t we Ma?” It was Lawrence’s impression that Mrs. Hubbard did not share his view.

Lawrence discovered that very few passengers had read the German warning. He did not find this surprising. “
When you are getting ready to sail on a transatlantic liner at noon,” he wrote, “you seldom have time to sit down and peruse the morning papers.”

Even those who had seen the warning paid little attention. The idea that Germany would dare attempt to sink a fully loaded civilian passenger ship seemed beyond rational consideration. And even if a U-boat did try, common wisdom held that it would inevitably fail. The
Lusitania
was simply too big and too fast, and once in British waters would doubtless be too well protected by the British navy.

Only two passengers canceled because of the warning itself, a wealthy shoe dealer from Boston, named Edward B. Bowen, and
his wife. They did so at the last minute. “
A feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the
Lusitania
,” Edward said, later. “I talked it over with Mrs. Bowen and we decided to cancel our passage—although I had an important business engagement in London.”

A few others canceled for reasons of illness and altered plans, or because they had resolved, warning aside, that sailing on a British ship in wartime wasn’t prudent. The famed Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry planned initially to travel with producer Frohman on the
Lusitania
, but well before the warning appeared she canceled her booking and switched to an American ship, the
New York
. She encouraged Rita Jolivet to do likewise, but Jolivet kept her original booking. One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the
Titanic
. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship
Hindenburg
, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the
Lusitania
was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. Second class was so full that a number of passengers learned to their delight that they had been given first-class rooms.

For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “
From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”

Moreover, a conviction existed among passengers that upon entering the waters off Britain’s west coast, the so-called Western Approaches, the ship would be met by the Royal Navy and escorted to Liverpool. Cunard encouraged this belief, and may have believed it as well, on the basis of the Royal Navy’s past efforts to direct and escort the company’s ships. Long before the sailing, Oscar Grab, twenty-eight, a newly married clothing importer from New York, made an appointment to talk with a Cunard representative about
submarines and the overall safety of transatlantic crossings. Grab’s wife of thirty-nine days had begged him to take an American ship. Grab and the Cunard official had a long talk, during which Grab was told that steps would be taken to protect the ship during the crossing. He felt reassured enough to buy a first-class ticket, although he waited to do so until the day before departure.

Any passenger who read that morning’s edition of the
New York Times
would have found explicit reassurance. In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “
there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.”

The
Times
reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?”

“Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.”

Passenger Ogden Hammond, a real-estate developer and a member of the State Assembly of New Jersey, asked a Cunard official if it was safe to cross on the ship and got the reply, “
Perfectly safe; safer than the trolley cars in New York City”—a possibly ill-advised answer, given the high frequency of fatal trolley accidents in the city.

Aboard the
Lusitania
, there was a good deal of gallows humor, but it was spoken from a position of comfort and confidence. “
Of course we heard rumors in New York that they
were
going to torpedo us, but we didn’t believe it for one moment,” said May Walker, one of the ship’s stewardesses. “We just laughed it off, and said they would never get us, we were too quick, too speedy. It was just the same kind of trip as it was any other trip.”

One of her tasks was to help manage passengers’ children. “There was all sorts of deck games. Quoits. And they had fancy dress parades for them,” Walker said. Children whose birthdays happened to fall during a voyage were given a party—“a little private party,” Walker said—and a birthday cake, with their names on it. “They had the time of their lives, and the run of the ship.”

On this voyage, she would have her hands full. Many British
families were now returning home to do their part in supporting the nation in time of war, and the ship’s size and speed provided a degree of reassurance. The passenger manifest listed ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants.

Whole families came aboard. Cunard set aside a group of first-class staterooms for Paul Crompton of Philadelphia and his wife and their six children—one “infant” included—and their nanny, twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Allen. (Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.) Crompton was a cousin of Cunard’s chairman, Alfred Allen Booth, whose Booth Group owned the steamship line. Crompton headed the group’s leather-goods subsidiary. Cunard’s New York manager, Sumner, greeted the family just before boarding and “
looked personally after their comfort for the voyage.” On the opposite side of the ship, one deck down, the Pearl family of New York took three first-class staterooms, E-51, E-59, and E-67. Frederic Pearl was headed to London for a posting at the American Embassy, and brought his wife and four children: a five-year-old son, two daughters under the age of three, and one infant. The Pearls brought along
two
nannies. The children, including the baby, stayed with their nannies in E-59 and E-67; the parents lounged in comparative bliss by themselves in E-51. Mrs. Pearl was pregnant.