Dead Wake (17 page)

Meanwhile, in the Caucasus, a Russian advance against Turkish forces steadily gained ground. The Turks blamed their losses on local populations of Armenians, whom they suspected of assisting the Russians, and began
a systematic slaughter of Armenian civilians. By May 1, the Turks had killed over fifty thousand Armenian men, women, and children in Van Province, in eastern Turkey. The head of the Armenian church sent a plea for help directly to Wilson; he demurred.

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “
It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military
operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.”

But the tendrils of conflict seemed to reach more and more insistently toward America’s shores. On April 30, five weeks after the sinking of the
Falaba
and the loss of American passenger Leon Thrasher, first details arrived in Washington about another attack, in which a German aircraft had bombed a U.S. merchant ship, the
Cushing
, as it traversed the North Sea. Three bombs fell, but only one struck. No one was hurt and the damage was minor. Just the day before, in another private memorandum, Lansing had written, “
A neutral in time of international war must always show forbearance, but never in the course of history have the patience and forbearance of neutrals been put to so severe a test as today.”

He saw grave meaning in the attack on the
Cushing
. “
German naval policy is one of wanton and indiscriminate destruction of vessels regardless of nationality,” he wrote to Secretary Bryan, on Saturday, May 1. But Wilson and Bryan, though troubled by the incident, resolved to treat it with more circumspection, as indicated in a report by the
New York Times
: “
It was not thought in official quarters that any serious issue would be raised, because it is accepted that the bombs were not dropped deliberately, but under the impression that a hostile vessel was being attacked.” This was a generous appraisal: at the time, the
Cushing
was flying an American flag, and its owners had painted the ship’s name on its hull in six-foot letters.

Another piece of news, more troubling in nature, had not yet reached the
Times
or the White House. That Saturday—the day of the
Lusitania
’s departure—a German U-boat torpedoed an American oil tanker, the
Gulflight
, near the Isles of Scilly off England’s Cornish coast, killing two men and causing the death by
heart attack of its captain.
The ship remained afloat, if barely, and was being towed to St. Mary’s Island, the largest of the Scillies, 45 miles west of Cornwall.

In Washington the dawn brought only a lovely spring Saturday, with temperatures destined to rise into the seventies and send men to their haberdashers for their first straw “
lids” of the season. The crowns of hats were expected to be shorter this year, the brims broader; gentlemen of course were expected to wear summer gloves made of silk, to keep their hands, as one ad put it, “
cool and clean.” The day promised to be one in which Wilson could indulge his dream, his hope, of love and an end to loneliness.

LUSITANIA

UNDER WAY

T
HE SHIP WAS SCHEDULED TO DEPART AT
10:00
A
.
M
., but now came a delay. In wartime, Britain’s Admiralty held the power to requisition for military service any ship under British flag. At very much the last minute, the Admiralty commandeered a passenger ship docked at New York, the
Cameronia
, which provided service to Liverpool and Glasgow. The
Cameronia
’s captain received his orders just as his ship was about to depart. Now some forty passengers and their belongings, and five female crew, were to be transferred to the
Lusitania
. Exactly how these passengers all felt about it, given the morning’s news about the German warning, cannot be known, though at least one account holds that the passengers were pleased, for the
Lusitania
represented the pinnacle of seaborne luxury and would, they believed, get them to Liverpool much faster than the smaller and slower
Cameronia
.

Aboard the
Lusitania
, one passenger, Richard Preston Prichard, took advantage of this delay to unpack one of his two cameras and bring it up on deck so that he could take photographs of the city and harbor. This camera was a Kodak No. 1, which collapsed into a form compact enough to fit into a coat pocket.

Prichard was twenty-nine years old, and stood five feet ten inches tall. His mother and brother called him Preston, possibly to avoid the unfortunate rhythm inherent in saying Richard Prichard.
They offered this description of him: “
Dark brown hair, with high forehead, blue eyes, and prominent features.
Very Deep dimple in chin
.” The underlining was theirs, and indeed the cleft in Prichard’s chin was a salient landmark. In another man it might have been disfiguring, but for him it was one feature in an indisputably handsome face, otherwise graced by full lips, dark eyebrows, pale skin, and rich dark hair combed up in a wave from his forehead, all anchored by those blue eyes, so striking in a man with dark hair and brows—“
a most interesting face,” one passenger said, “with marked features which any one once seeing could scarcely forget.”

Prichard was a medical student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he had enrolled after trying his hand at various jobs, including lumberjack and farmer. He had moved to Canada after the death of his father, to earn money to send back to his mother in England. He was traveling in second class, room D-90, an interior cabin opposite the
Lusitania
’s barbershop, and shared the room with three other men, all strangers to one another. He had an upper berth and carried with him three “grips,” or suitcases. He often wore a tie clip with a gold ring inlaid with tiny red and white “lava heads,” decorative faces carved from the kind of lava rock often used for cameos and brooches. He had packed two suits for the crossing, one dark blue, the other a more casual suit in green.

On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray—“
rather dull,” as Sumner put it—and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography.

Sumner liked Prichard immediately. He saw him as “such another fellow as myself.” Both were traveling solo, and they were destined to encounter each other often during the voyage. Sumner liked Prichard’s ability to take great delight in life but without intruding on others. He “seemed very pleasant and enjoyed himself in a very quiet manner,” Sumner wrote, “—you will understand
what I mean, [he] didn’t go about in a rowdy fashion like lots of fellows do having a time.” A fellow second-class passenger, Henry Needham, said of Prichard, “
He was a great favorite on board, he arranged the whist drives & seemed to do most of the work.” A whist drive was a social event during which passengers grouped themselves in pairs and played game after game of whist until one team won.

Now Prichard was on his way back to England for a visit, and according to one of his cabin mates, Arthur Gadsden, he was very excited to be doing so—“
counting the time” until his arrival, Gadsden said.

T
HE TRANSFER
of the
Cameronia
’s passengers took two hours. Although later this delay would prove significant to a degree far greater than its brevity might suggest, for now it was merely maddening. Captain Turner prided himself on his skill at deftly managing the
Lusitania
’s arrivals and departures, which meant casting off precisely on schedule.

Turner had no concern about the German warning. Shortly before departure, he was standing on the ship’s promenade deck, talking with Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman, when one of the ship-news men—apparently not Jack Lawrence—approached and asked Vanderbilt if he thought he’d be as lucky this time as he had been in deciding not to sail on the
Titanic
. Vanderbilt smiled but said nothing.

Turner put his hand on Vanderbilt’s shoulder and said to the reporter, “
Do you think all these people would be booking passage on board the
Lusitania
if they thought she could be caught by a German submarine? Why it’s the best joke I’ve heard in many days, this talk of torpedoing the
Lusitania
.”

Both Vanderbilt and Turner laughed.

A
NOTHER DELAY
occurred, but for this one Captain Turner was at least partly responsible. His niece, the actress Mercedes Desmore,
had come aboard for a quick tour and was nearly stranded when the crew, having boarded all the extra
Cameronia
passengers, removed the gangway. Turner angrily ordered it replaced so that his niece could get off. The process further postponed the ship’s departure.

One passenger, set designer Oliver Bernard, took note. “Captain Turner,” he wrote, later, “
neglected his duty at the wharf in New York at a time when the vessel should have been sailing—by having a relative on board.” By the time Bernard made this charge, he had come to understand what few others seemed to grasp, which was that on this particular voyage, given the convergence of disparate forces, timing was everything. Even the briefest delay could shape history.

T
HE MEN
operating the motion-picture camera outside the Cunard terminal moved it to a higher prospect, apparently the building’s roof, until the camera was at about the height of the ship’s bridge, with its lens aimed downward to capture scenes on the decks below. In the film, passengers crowd the starboard side, many waving white handkerchiefs the size of cloth diapers. One man flourishes an American flag, while nearby a woman props her baby on a deck rail.

A few moments later, a young sailor climbs a stairway to the docking bridge, an elevated, narrow platform spanning the deck near the ship’s stern. He raises a white flag on a pole on the port side, then sprints across to raise a duplicate flag on the starboard side, a visual signal that departure is imminent. Soon afterward, just past noon, the
Lusitania
begins to ease backward. The camera remains stationary, but the slow, smooth motion of the ship produces the illusion that it is the camera that is moving, panning across the ship’s full length.

A crewman standing atop a lifeboat works on its ropes. A first-cabin steward steps smartly out of a doorway and walks directly to a male passenger, as if delivering a message. At the top of a stairway, staring directly at the camera, is a man the filmmakers
instantly recognize, Elbert Hubbard, in his Stetson, though his cravat is barely visible under the buttoned front of his overcoat.

The ship’s bridge now passes by, at camera level, and there is Turner, in frame 289. He stands at the starboard end of the bridge wing. As the ship slides past the camera, the captain, smiling, turns toward the lens and removes his hat, once, in a brief wave, then leans comfortably against the rail.

Once the ship has backed fully into the Hudson, two tugboats gingerly nudge its bow toward the south, downstream, and the ship begins to move under its own power. As the
Lusitania
at last exits the frame, the wharves of Hoboken become visible in the distance, heavily hazed with smoke and mist.

The film ends.

W
HILE MOVING
downriver Turner kept his speed slow, as freighters, lighters, tugs, and ferries of all sizes adjusted their own courses to make way. The Hudson here was busy. A 1909 sea chart shows the shore of Manhattan so closely packed with piers as to evoke a piano keyboard. The river was also surprisingly shallow, just deep enough to accept the
Lusitania
’s nearly 36-foot draft. Turner’s crew had balanced the vessel so well that at the time of departure the draft at the bow, as indicated by markings on the hull, was just 4 inches deeper than at the stern.

The river was lined on both sides with piers and terminals; on the New Jersey flank—the right side as the ship moved down the river—lay the vast track-covered wharves of various railroads, among them the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the New Jersey Central. On the left was a succession of piers, bearing, in order of descent down the Hudson, names that spoke to the ubiquity of sea travel:

South Pacific Co.

Colonial Line

Albany Line

Clyde Line

Savannah Line

People’s Line

Old Dominion Line

Ben Franklin Line

Fall River Line

Providence Line

Here too were the many ferries that carried goods and people between New Jersey and the city, with terminals at Desbrosses, Chambers, Barclay, Cortland, and Liberty Streets. The ferry to the Statue of Liberty operated from the southernmost tip of Manhattan.