Dead Wake (34 page)

Isaac Lehmann, the New York businessman, did not share this confidence in the ship’s unsinkability. He went to his stateroom to get his life jacket and found that someone had entered his room and taken it. A nervous man, Lehmann feared chaos. “
I don’t know what possessed me,” he said, “but I looked in my dress suit case and got hold of my revolver, as I figured this would come in handy in case there was anybody not doing the proper thing.”

T
HERE WERE
shipbuilders among the
Lusitania
’s passengers, and at first they too believed the ship would remain afloat. One of
them, Frederic J. Gauntlett, an executive with the Newport News Ship Building and Dry Dock Company, was on his way to Europe to meet with builders of submarines with an eye to starting a venture in the United States. He was traveling with the company’s president, Albert Hopkins.

Gauntlett was at lunch with Hopkins and another shipbuilder, a Philadelphian named Samuel Knox. (It was Knox’s company that had built the
Gulflight
, the American oil tanker torpedoed a week earlier.) They sat at their usual table, the sixth one back, on the starboard side. They wore suits; the tablecloths were white, and each table had clear glass vases with cut flowers. Sunlight streamed through the windows.

The room tilted to the right. A vase fell from Gauntlett’s table. “
I left my coffee and nuts,” he said, “and rose from the table and shouted to the stewards to close the ports.” As a shipbuilder, he understood the danger posed by open portholes. He shouted half a dozen times. “The stewards evidently had business elsewhere,” he said, “and when they left the dining saloon I followed suit and left the dining room also.”

He and his lunch mates did not themselves attempt to close the ports, and these remained open. Gauntlett went to the coatrack, got his hat, and retrieved Knox’s as well. They walked up three flights to the boat deck.

Gauntlett was reassured that the list seemed to stabilize at 15 degrees. He was convinced the angle would not worsen and “never for one moment supposed she was going to sink.” He said as much to a woman standing nearby, surrounded by her children. She asked him what to do. “I told her there was no danger,” he said; the ship “was not going to sink.”

Gauntlett expected the bulkheads and watertight doors to keep the hull from flooding further, but then he sensed a change. The list became more pronounced, as did the tilt toward the bow, at which point, he said, “I made up my mind that it was up to me to take a look around and see what the trouble was.”

He made his way to the railing at the forward end of the deck
and looked over at the bow below. The forecastle was partially submerged.

He went to his room and put on his life jacket.

A
LL THE
ship’s systems were now dead. The rudder no longer operated. The main electric dynamo had failed. All lights were out; anyone walking along an interior corridor now found himself in blackness. The operator in the Marconi room on the topmost deck switched to emergency power.
The two first-class elevators at the center of the ship stalled. According to one account, passengers within began to scream.

The elevator that provided the only access to the ship’s baggage room also stopped.
The scores of men working to get passengers’ luggage ready for arrival either were dead from the torpedo blast, or would be soon, as water filled the bow. A fireman who escaped Boiler Room No. 2, Eugene McDermott, described a “
rush of water that knocked me off my feet.” Many of the dead crewmen were precisely those who would have been assigned to help launch the ship’s lifeboats.

Now the sea found a new path into the hull. Water began to flow through open portholes, many of which were barely above the water to begin with. Those of E Deck, for example, normally cleared the water by only 15 feet.
By one estimate, at least 70 portholes had been left open in the starboard side. Multiplied by 3.75 tons of water per minute per porthole, that meant that 260 tons was entering the ship each minute through the starboard portholes alone.

It was now about 2:20
P
.
M
., ten minutes since the torpedo struck. For the next few moments, as deckhands and passengers waited for the ship to slow enough to allow the safe launching of boats, there was quiet. “
A strange silence prevailed,” said Albert Bestic, junior third officer, “and small, insignificant sounds, such as the whimper of a child, the cry of a seagull or the bang of a door, assumed alarming proportions.”

FIRST WORD

T
HE TELEGRAMS ARRIVED AT THE
A
DMIRALTY IN
L
ONDON
and the Naval Center in Queenstown in rapid and jarring sequence, sent from various points:

2:15
FROM
V
ALENTIA STATION TO
Q
UEENSTOWN
:

“ ‘L
USITANIA
’
IN DISTRESS OFF
K
INSALE
. B
ELIEVED
.”

2:20
FROM
G
ALLEY
H
EAD TO
A
DMIRALTY
:

“ ‘L
USITANIA
’ S.E. 10
MILES SINKING BOW FIRST APPARENTLY ATTACKED BY SUBMARINE
.”

2:25
FROM
Q
UEENSTOWN TO
A
DMIRALTY
:

“ ‘L
USITANIA
’
TORPEDOED REPORTED SINKING
10
MILES
S.
OF
K
INSALE
. A
LL AVAILABLE TUGS AND SMALL CRAFT BEING SENT TO HER ASSISTANCE
. A
BERDEEN
, P
EMBROKE
, B
UNCRANA
, D
EVONPORT
, L
IVERPOOL INFORMED
.”

LUSITANIA

DECISIONS

T
HE FIRST ATTEMPTS TO LAUNCH THE
L
USITANIA
’
S
LIFEBOATS
revealed the true degree of danger now faced by the ship’s passengers and shattered the illusion of safety projected by having so many boats aboard. The list was so severe that the boats on the starboard side now hung well away from the hull, leaving a gap between the boats and the deck of 5 to 8 feet, with the sea 60 feet below. Members of the crew tried using deck chairs to span the opening, but most passengers chose to jump. Parents handed small children across. One boy took a running leap and landed in a boat feet-first.

Meanwhile, the lifeboats on the opposite side, the port side, had swung inward over the deck. These were all but unusable. Only a great effort could move them into position for launch. Capt. Turner ordered them emptied, but as the ship’s condition worsened, passengers and crew tried to launch them anyway.

Ogden Hammond, the New Jersey real-estate developer who’d been assured the ship was as safe as a New York trolley, walked along the port side of the boat deck with his wife, Mary, until they found themselves at Boat No. 20, which a group of crewmen and male passengers had somehow muscled to a point outside the rail. Women and children were climbing aboard.

Neither Mary nor Ogden wore a life jacket. He had wanted to go down to their stateroom and retrieve the jackets stored there,
but Mary had pleaded with him not to leave her. They had hunted for jackets on deck but found none.

At the lifeboat, Ogden balked at climbing aboard, out of respect for the maritime custom that gave women and children priority. Mary refused to go unless Ogden came too, so the couple stood aside, watching the process and waiting. At last Ogden agreed to get in. He and Mary took a place near the bow. The boat was half full, with about thirty-five people, when the attempt to launch it began.

Men at the bow and stern manipulated the ropes—the falls—that ran through block and tackle at each end of the boat. A sailor at the bow lost control of his rope. Ogden tried to grab it, but the rope was running so fast it tore the skin from his hands. The bow plunged; the stern rope held. Everyone fell from the boat into the sea, 60 feet below.

Ogden came to the surface; his wife did not. He reached for an oar floating nearby.

A
T THE NEXT
port-side boat, No. 18, another launching attempt had stalled.
This boat contained forty women and children, and was held in place by a restraining pin. The sailor in charge refused to lower it, in accord with Turner’s orders, but held an ax, ready to knock the pin loose should the orders change. Several dozen passengers stood between the boat and the outer wall of the first-class smoking room.

Isaac Lehmann, the New York businessman, was shocked that no effort was being made to launch the boat. He had managed to find a life jacket; his revolver was in his pocket. He glanced toward the ship’s bow and saw water advancing along the deck. He demanded to know why the sailor didn’t act.

“
It is the captain’s orders not to launch any boats,” the sailor replied.

“To hell with the captain,” Lehmann said. “Don’t you see the boat is sinking?” He drew his revolver. “And the first man that disobeys my orders to launch the boat I shoot to kill!”

The sailor complied. He swung his ax to knock out the restraining pin. The boat was heavy to begin with, but now loaded with three tons of humanity it swung inward, crushing everyone between the boat and the wall. At least two passengers, sisters in their fifties, died instantly, of injuries associated with severe crushing. Lehmann’s right leg was damaged, but he managed to crawl from the mass of wounded bystanders. This was not easy. He was a large, round man and wore a long overcoat and a life jacket.

Passengers and crew again attempted to launch the lifeboat. They were making progress when something went awry and this boat too dumped its passengers into the water. At about the same time, Lehmann said, a “terrific explosion” rose from the deck in the direction of the bow. This new convulsion was likely caused by water infiltrating yet another boiler room and coming in contact with a superheated tank, one of a number of such secondary eruptions. Only about fourteen minutes had passed since the torpedo impact, but the sea was climbing fast.

M
ANY PASSENGERS
decided to forgo the boats and take a more direct path. Dwight Harris headed toward the bow, as per his plan. He climbed over the port rail on A Deck and scuttled down the side of the ship, two decks, then went toward the bow, which had sunk to the point where all he would have to do was step into the water. He took off his shoes and discarded his overcoat, his hat, and his Medici book. He had no life jacket, not even his custom Wanamaker’s belt. He too had been afraid to go to his cabin for fear of being trapped. But now, at the water’s edge and facing the real prospect of drowning, he changed his mind.

“
I took a look at things and decided I must have a life belt so I climbed up again to ‘A’ deck and rushed to my cabin,” he wrote. He put the belt on and returned to the bow. An officer called to him to come up to the lifeboats, “but I realized that all available space in them was badly wanted, so I shook my head no!—I got up on the rail, swung my feet over, and when the water got right up to the deck I jumped overboard!”

As he swam away, he looked up, and saw the ship’s giant funnels move past against the sky.

T
HEODATE
P
OPE
and Edwin Friend had planned that if an emergency arose they would rendezvous on the boat deck with Theodate’s maid, Emily Robinson. “
The deck suddenly looked very strange crowded with people,” Theodate wrote, “and I remember two women were crying in a pitifully weak way.” Theodate and Friend looked over the port side and watched a boat being lowered. One end fell too fast and everyone plummeted into the sea. This could have been Ogden Hammond’s boat, or the one Lehmann tried to launch at gunpoint. “We looked at each other, sickened by the sight, and then made our way through the crowd for deck B on the starboard side.”

As they stood at the rail, they saw that efforts to launch the lifeboats on this side were having more success. Boats came down past them, winched slowly from the deck above. The two feared the ship was sinking so quickly and with so pronounced a list that it might roll onto the boats after they reached the water.

They climbed back up to the boat deck but made no attempt to board any of the remaining lifeboats.

“
We walked close together, side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist,” Theodate recalled. The two met a passenger whom by now they knew well, Marie Depage, the Belgian nurse. Depage seemed stunned. “She had a man on either side of her, friends of hers, so I did not speak,” Theodate wrote. “It was no time for words unless one could offer help.”

Theodate and Friend headed toward the stern, now an uphill climb. Her maid came up beside them and Theodate noted the tense smile etched on her face. “I could only put my hand on her shoulder and say, ‘Oh Robinson.’ ”

They searched for life jackets. They entered several cabins and found three. Friend helped the women put them on; they all walked to the rail. The ship’s giant funnels towered above them at an exaggerated slant. The water was far below.

Theodate glanced at Friend. The two looked down at the water. The time had come. “I asked him to go first,” she wrote.

Friend climbed down one deck, then jumped. He disappeared briefly, but soon bobbed to the surface, and looked up at the women. The ship continued to move forward; his form receded.

Theodate said, “
Come Robinson,” and stepped off the rail.

G
RACE
F
RENCH
ran back to where she and Preston Prichard had been standing at the moment of impact. He was nowhere in sight. She went to the rail, took off her coat, and jumped. She had no life jacket. Her plan was to swim until she found a piece of floating debris. The jump took her deep under the surface, where an eddy caused by the passing ship held her down.