Dead Wake (36 page)

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.”

Morton worked the stern falls, as the petty officer directed the operation. The ship was still moving at 4 or 5 knots. The men lowered the lifeboat until its keel was just above the surface, and then, in accord with procedures for just this kind of circumstance, they let the lines play out so that when the boat touched water it would slip backward.

It drifted back one boat’s length. The falls and the forward motion of the ship caused the boat to ride against the ship’s hull. Morton was just about to climb down the stern ropes to clear the lifeboat when a group of less experienced men—Morton thought they might be stewards or waiters—began lowering the next boat back and lost control of its descent. The boat dropped 30 feet onto Morton’s boat and the passengers within.

There was no time “
to waste in either horror or sympathy,” Morton wrote. He looked for his brother, amid mounting confusion, “many people losing their hold on the deck and slipping down and over the side, and a gradual crescendo of noise building up as the hundreds and hundreds of people began to realize that, not only was she going down very fast but in all probability too fast for them all to get away.”

He found his brother at another lifeboat and helped him to lower it. The brothers then slid down and released the falls and used boat hooks to try shoving the lifeboat away from the hull. The passengers wouldn’t let go of the ship. They held tight to various ropes and to the deck rails, “
in some mistaken belief,” Morton wrote, “that they would be safer hanging on to the big ship rather
than entrusting their lives in the small lifeboat.” The
Lusitania
’s deck came steadily downward.

Something snagged the gunnel of the lifeboat and began tipping it toward the ship’s hull. “
The time for heroics was obviously past,” Morton wrote, “and my brother yelled at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going over the side, Gertie.’ ”

The brothers waved at each other, then both dove into the sea. Neither wore a life jacket.

Morton wrote, “As I hit the water, and it is strange what one thinks about in times of stress, I suddenly remembered that my brother had never been able to swim.”

Morton came to the surface and looked for his brother, “
but seeing the turmoil of bodies, women and children, deck chairs, lifebelts, lifeboats, and every describable thing around me, coupled with no less than 35,000 tons of
Lusitania
breathing very heavily down my neck and altogether too close for my liking,” he began to swim. Hard.

He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the
Lusitania
began its final dive.

L
AURIAT SWAM
clear of the ship—or thought he had. He turned to watch its final moments. The bow was submerged, and slipping deeper into the sea; the stern was high in the air. The list to starboard had become so pronounced that passengers could stand upright only by propping themselves against the starboard rail, where they accumulated three or four deep in a long line that extended up toward the stern. Another witness called this assemblage “a little army.” If anyone still harbored a hope that the
Lusitania
would not sink, that hope now failed.

Passengers back toward the stern, and therefore higher, watched as those ahead in line lost their grip on the rail. Those wearing life jackets floated, as if levitated from the deck; the many without jackets attempted to swim or sank from view.

Third Officer Bestic, still aboard, felt the ship make a “peculiar lurching movement” and looked down the deck. “
An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path,” he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it engulfed. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”

A
S MEASLE
-
POXED
Robert Kay and his pregnant mother struggled to ascend to the boat deck, the sounds of commotion above became more and more clear. They emerged to find themselves in a crush of people climbing toward the stern to escape the water ascending the deck. Robert watched people jump from the rails.

The ship continued to move; its stern rose higher. His mother held him close. And then the sea seemed to leap forward, and his mother was gone. They were separated; he was cast into a roiling turbulence. The ship disappeared.

Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.

A
S
C
HARLES
L
AURIAT
watched the ship pass and descend, something struck his head with shocking force. Whatever the thing was, it slipped back onto the shoulders of his life jacket, and caught there, and dragged him under.
“I couldn’t imagine what was landing on me out of the sky,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t have been as much surprised if the submarine had risen and I had found myself on her, but to get a bolt from the blue did surprise me.”

He turned his head and saw that the thing that had snagged him was a wire stretched between the ship’s two masts. This, he realized, was the
Lusitania
’s wireless antenna. He tried to shake it off but failed. It turned him upside down and pushed him ever deeper below the surface.

TELEGRAM

F
RIDAY
,

M
AY
7, 1915

2:26
P
.
M
.

“S.O.S.
FROM
‘L
USITANIA
.’ W
E THINK WE ARE OFF
K
INSALE
. L
ATE POSITION
10
MILES OFF
K
INSALE COME AT ONCE BIG LIST LATER PLEASE COME WITH ALL HASTE
.”

LUSITANIA

A QUEEN’S END

O
NLY SIX OF THE
L
USITANIA
’
S TWENTY
-
TWO CONVENTIONAL
lifeboats got away before the ship made its final plunge; a seventh, from the port side, reached the water, but without a crucial plug. The boat filled, and foundered.

Those passengers who had already jumped from the ship swam to get as far away as possible, for fear that the ship’s descent would generate suction that would drag them down as well. This did not occur, although three passengers did experience a kindred effect.
One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot.
Two other passengers accompanied her into the funnel—Harold Taylor, twenty-one, also newly married, and Liverpool police inspector William Pierpoint. They too emerged alive, with blackened faces and bodies.

As the ship’s bow nosed down, its stern rose, exposing its four giant propellers, which glinted gold in the sun. By now the
Lusitania
was 2 miles from the point where the torpedo had struck, and about 12 miles from the Old Head of Kinsale. In these last moments, the angle of starboard list decreased to only about 5 degrees, as water filled the rest of ship.

Seaman Morton turned onto his back and watched. He saw passengers swept from the deck and hundreds of others struggling
to climb toward the stern. The
Lusitania
again heeled to starboard and slipped from view, in “
a slow, almost stately, dive by the head, at an angle of some forty-five or fifty degrees.”

Dwight Harris, floating a good distance astern in his Wanamaker’s life belt, watched as the ship “
plunged forward like a knife blade into the water—funnels, masts, boats, etc., all breaking to pieces and falling about everywhere! A
terrible
mass of iron, wood, steam, and water! And worst of all, human forms!—A great swirling greenish white bubble formed where the ship went down, which was a mass of struggling humanity and wreckage! The bubble got bigger and bigger, and fortunately only came to within twenty or thirty yards of me shoving wreckage with it.”

T
HIS UPHEAVAL
was a singular feature of the ship’s demise, commented upon by many survivors. The sea rose as a plateau of water that spread in all directions. It carried bodies and masses of debris, and was accompanied by a strange sound.

Charles Lauriat emerged just as the
Lusitania
disappeared. By kicking hard he somehow managed to free himself of the antenna wire. “
As she went under,” Lauriat wrote, “I was not conscious of hearing cries; rather it was a long, lingering moan that rose, and which lasted for many moments after she disappeared.” Lauriat was overtaken by the wave. “The mass of wreckage was tremendous,” he wrote. “Aside from the people brought out with it, there were deck chairs, oars, boxes, and I can’t remember what. I simply know that one moment one was jammed between large objects, and the next moment one was under the water.”