Dead Wake (40 page)

Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for one reason or another had ended up on the
Lusitania
, as was the case with the passengers of the
Cameronia
transferred to the ship at the last minute. The transfers included passengers Margaret and James Shineman, newlyweds from Oil City, Wyoming, who suddenly found themselves aboard the fastest, most luxurious ship in service, for their journey to Scotland to visit Margaret’s family. The visit was to be a surprise. Both were killed. Of the forty-two passengers and crew transferred, only thirteen survived, among them Miss Grace French, who breezed through the whole ordeal with aplomb.

There was the usual confusion that follows disasters.
For days dozens of cables shot back and forth between Cunard offices in
Liverpool, Queenstown, and New York. These conveyed a sense of both urgency and surprise, as though Cunard had never expected to lose one of its great ships and to actually have to use its passenger records to tally the living and dead.

M
AY
10: “D
ID
G
UY
L
EWIN ACTUALLY SAIL
L
USITANIA
.”

M
AY
10: “N
AME
C
HARLES
W
ARMEY APPEARS ON SECOND CLASS SHOULD THIS BE
C
HARLES
W
ARING WHICH DOES NOT APPEAR
—
REPLY QUICKLY
.”

M
AY
11: “D
ID
F A T
WIGG ACTUALLY EMBARK
L
USITANIA
.”

M
AY
11: “G
IVE US FULL
C
HRISTIAN NAMES AND CLASSES ALL PASSENGERS NAMED
A
DAMS WHO SAILED
L
USITANIA
—
VERY URGENT
.”

A few passengers reported to be dead were in fact alive, but more often those reported alive were dead. “Report of Mr. Bilicke as survivor is erroneous,” U.S. consul Frost wrote in a terse telegram to Ambassador Page in London. A five-year-old boy, Dean Winston Hodges, was at first said to be safe, but then came a cable from Cunard to its New York office, “Regret no trace of Master Dean Winston Hodges.” His body proved to be among those taken aboard the rescue ship
Flying Fish
. Names of the dead were misspelled, offering moments of false hope. A man identified as Fred Tyn was in fact Fred Tyers, who had died; Teresa Desley was in fact Teresa Feeley, who perished along with her husband, James. There were two Mrs. Hammonds. One lived; the other—Ogden’s wife—died. Two waiters were named John Leach. One survived, the other did not. A dead passenger named Greenfield was in fact Greenshields.

Time zones and sluggish communication made it even harder on friends and kin. Those who could afford the cost sent cables to Cunard with detailed descriptions of their loved ones, down to the serial numbers stamped on their watches, but these cables took
hours to receive, transcribe, and deliver. In those first days after the disaster, thousands of cables flooded Cunard’s offices. Cunard had little information to provide.

The dead collected at Queenstown were placed in three makeshift morgues, including Town Hall, where they were placed side by side on the floor. Whenever possible, children were placed beside their mothers. Survivors moved in slow, sad lines looking for lost kin.

There were reunions of a happier sort as well.

Seaman Leslie Morton spent Friday night looking for his brother Cliff on the lists of survivors and in the hotels of Queenstown but found no trace. Early the next morning he sent a telegram to his father, “
Am saved, looking for Cliff.” He went to one of the morgues. “Laid out in rows all the way down on both sides were sheeted and shrouded bodies,” he wrote, “and a large number of people in varying states of sorrow and distress were going from body to body, turning back the sheets to see if they could identify loved ones who had not yet been found.”

He worked his way along, lifting sheets. Just as he was about to pull yet one more, he saw the hand of another searcher reaching for the same sheet. He looked over, and saw his brother. Their reaction was deadpan.

“Hallo, Cliff, glad to see you,” Leslie said.

“Am I glad to see you too, Gert,” Cliff said. “I think we ought to have a drink on this!”

As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, “so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.”

That night Leslie had his first-ever Guinness. “I cannot say that I thought much of it in those days, but it seemed a good thing in which to celebrate being alive, having got together again and being in Ireland.”

T
HE RESCUE SHIPS
brought in many of the bodies, but many others were recovered from the coves and beaches of Ireland, as the sea brought them ashore.
One man’s body was found on a beach clutching a foot-long fragment of a lifeboat, which later would find its way into the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the wood still bearing the brand
Lusitania
.

Consul Frost took responsibility for managing the American dead. The “important” bodies, meaning those in first class, were embalmed at U.S. expense. “
There was a curious effacement of social or mental distinction by death, and we often believed a corpse to be important when it turned out to be decidedly the opposite,” Frost wrote. “The commonest expression was one of reassured tranquillity, yet with an undertone of puzzlement or aggrievement as though some trusted friend had played a practical joke which the victim did not yet understand.”
The unimportant bodies were sealed inside lead coffins, “so that they could be returned to America whenever desired.”

Cunard went to great lengths to number, photograph, and catalog the recovered bodies.
Body No. 1 was that of Catherine Gill, a forty-year-old widow; Body No. 91 was that of chief purser McCubbin, for whom this was to be the last voyage before retirement. Nearly all the dead were photographed in coffins, though one lies in what appears to be a large wheelbarrow, and a toddler rests on a makeshift platform. They still wear their coats, suits, dresses, and jewelry. A mother and tiny daughter, presumably found together, share a coffin. The mother is turned toward her daughter; the child lies with one arm resting across her mother’s chest. They look as though they could step from this coffin and resume their lives. Others convey the same restful aspect. A handsome clean-shaven man in his thirties, Body No. 59, lies dressed neatly in white shirt, tweed jacket, polka-dotted bow tie, and dark overcoat. The textures are comforting; the buttons on his overcoat are shiny, like new.

These photographs beg viewers to imagine last moments. Here is Body No. 165, a girl in a white dress with a lacy top. Hair flung back, mouth open as if in a scream, her whole aspect is one of fear
and pain. One victim, identified only as Body No. 109, is that of a stout woman who lies naked under a rough blanket, her hair still flecked with sand. Unlike all the other bodies in this collection of photographs, her eyes are squeezed tightly shut. Her cheeks are puffed, her lips are tightly clamped. She looks uncannily as if she were still holding her breath.

The most unsettling image here is that of Body No. 156, a girl of about three, slightly chubby, with curly blond hair, wearing a pullover sweater with overlong sleeves. What is troubling is the child’s expression. She looks perturbed. Someone laid flowers across her chest and at her side. But she seems unmollified. She lies on a wood pallet, beside what appears to be a life jacket. Her expression is one of pure fury.

Consul Frost found the sight of so many drowned children difficult to expunge from his thoughts. He had a young daughter of his own. “
Several weeks after the disaster, one night out at my home, I went into a bedroom with a lighted match and came unexpectedly upon the sleeping form of my own little daughter,” he wrote. For an instant, his mind was jolted back to scenes he had witnessed in the morgues. “I give you my word I recoiled as though I had found a serpent.”

T
HE SEARCH
for bodies still adrift in the sea continued until June, when Cunard suggested to Frost that the time had come to halt the effort. He concurred. The search was suspended on June 4, but bodies continued to wash ashore well into the summer. The later a body was recovered, the higher its assigned number, the worse its condition. Two men came ashore in County Kerry on July 14 and 15, some 200 miles, by sea, from the wreck. One wore a cleric’s clothing and had “perfect teeth,” according to a report on the find, which noted, “
Much of the body was eaten away.” The second had no head, arms, or feet, but, like some tentacled sea creature, dragged behind him a full complement of clothing—blue serge trousers, black-and-white-striped flannel shirt, woolen undershirt, undershorts, suspenders, a belt, and a keychain with seven keys.
To encourage reporting of new arrivals, Cunard offered a one-pound reward.
Frost offered an additional pound to anyone who recovered a corpse that was demonstrably a U.S. citizen.

On July 11, 1915, one American did come ashore, at Stradbally, Ireland. At first authorities believed him to be a
Lusitania
victim and designated him Body No. 248. He had not been a passenger, however.
His name was Leon C. Thrasher, the American who had gone missing on March 28 when the SS
Falaba
was torpedoed and sunk. He had been in the water 106 days.

The people who discovered remains treated them with great respect, despite their often grotesque condition.
Such was the case when the body of a middle-aged man was found on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula on July 17, seventy-one days after the disaster. The currents and winds had taken him on a long journey around the southwest rim of Ireland before depositing him at Brandon Bay, a distance of about 250 miles from Queenstown. His body was discovered by a local citizen, who notified the Royal Irish Constabulary in Castlegregory, 6 miles to the east. A sergeant, J. Regan, promptly set out by bicycle, accompanied by a constable, and soon arrived at the scene, an austere but lovely beach. Here they found what little remained of an apparently male corpse. That the man had come from the
Lusitania
was obvious. Part of a life jacket was still attached to the body, and another portion lay nearby, marked
Lusitania
.

There was little question as to his identity. When the officers went through what remained of the man’s clothing, they found a watch, with the initials V.O.E.S. stamped on its case, and a knife marked “Victor E. Shields,” and a letter addressed to “Mr. Victor Shields, care of steamer Lusitania.” The letter was dated April 30, 1915, the day before the ship left New York. In one pocket the officers discovered a copy of an entertainment program from the ship. The documents were soaked. The officers laid them in the sun to dry.

Sergeant Regan noted that the tide was rising quickly, “so I sent for a sheet and placed the body on it and carried it from the tide to a place of safety.” He then cycled to a telegraph office
and wired the local coroner, who replied that no inquest would be necessary. The police ordered a lead casket and wooden shell, and by evening Shields was placed in a “Swansdown” robe and coffined within. The undertaker took the coffin to a private home, where it remained until the next day, when police buried it in a nearby graveyard. “Everything was done that could be done by the Police,” Sergeant Regan wrote in a letter to Consul Frost, “in fact they could do no more for a member of their family, and I on behalf of the Police tender Mrs. Shields our sincere sympathy in her bereavement.”

For disbelieving families, struck by grief, it was important to know precisely how their loved ones had died, whether by drowning, exposure, or physical trauma. The Shields family took this to extremes and ordered the body disinterred. The family wanted an autopsy. This was easier asked than achieved. “
Needless to say,” wrote Frost, “it proved virtually impossible to procure a physician of advanced years and high standing to dissect remains seventy-five days after decease.” Frost did manage to find two younger doctors who were willing to take on the task. The character of this endeavor was made clear in the report of one of the physicians, Dr. John Higgins, acting house surgeon of Cork’s North Infirmary.

The autopsy began at 2:30, July 23, at the office of an undertaker; the second doctor was to perform his own autopsy the next day. A plumber now opened the lead casket in which Victor Shields lay, and soon the scent of heated lead was joined by another sort of odor. Consul Frost was present for this, but Higgins noted that at a point about halfway through the autopsy he left, “when he was called away.”