Lusitania (6 page)

“Bells were ringing their signals for final preparation,” Phoebe Amory remembered. “The shrill blasts from the tugboats announced that they were ready to begin their labor of moving the great ship from her moorings, and the deep, throaty reply from the chimes of the
Lusitania
voiced her assent.”
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Hatches were sealed, gangways pulled in, lines hauled up, and doors closed as the ship readied for her voyage. Cameras clicked and men along the pier cranked their newsreels, capturing Captain Turner as he looked out from the bridge.
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Deep below, a grimy contingent of shirtless trimmers rushed wheelbarrows filled with coal from bunkers to boiler rooms. Mustachioed Chief Engineer Archibald Bryce shouted orders and watched the gauges as stokers relentlessly fed the fuel into
Lusitania
’s blisteringly hot furnaces. Everything “clanked and rattled and hissed and squeaked” as the ship built up steam.
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A deep rumble shivered through
Lusitania
as her steam turbine engines came to life.
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Members of the Royal Gwent Singers, returning home to Wales after an American tour, loudly sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while the ship’s five-man band launched into “Tipperary” as the crowd along the pier cheered and waved. Three little tugs gently eased the black hull out into the Hudson.
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Gulls swooped and circled as
Lusitania
’s four immense bronze propellers twisted and turned, churning behind them a wide wake of foam. Slowly, surely,
Lusitania
steamed past Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and what Theodore Dreiser deemed “the magnificent wall of lower New York, set like a jewel in a green ring of seawater,” as the city receded in the distance.
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Smoke curled from her funnels and waves furrowed against her bow as
Lusitania
picked up speed. Across the Hudson, a line of German passenger liners, kept at dock for fear that British cruisers patrolling the waters outside of America’s three-mile limit would sink them as potential enemy auxiliary cruisers if they attempted to return home, attracted much attention.
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With the sun now shining on the brass letters of her proud name,
Lusitania
was on her way out of New York, bound for Liverpool on her 101st return voyage.

CHAPTER ONE

A wave of excited, enthusiastic adulation followed
Lusitania
out of New York harbor—a distant echo of a fine, early summer day nine years earlier, when another expectant crowd had gathered along the banks of Scotland’s River Clyde. Then, the usual sounds of shouted orders, melding metal, and ceaseless hammering of rivets at the John Brown Shipyard had temporarily fallen silent, replaced by the rousing strains of “Rule Britannia.” Gentlemen in frock coats or dark uniforms awash with shining medals had stood with ladies dressed in summer pastels, their faces shielded from the sun by wide picture hats adorned with flowers and a kaleidoscope of twirling parasols. All eyes gazed on the black-hulled vessel dwarfing the slipway. At half-past noon, a bottle of champagne cracked across her stately bow as she received the name
Lusitania
.
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At the time of her launch, she was the largest, fastest, and most magnificent ocean liner in the world.

It was the Golden Age of the Steamship, a time when travel was not merely the means to an end but an end in itself. “How you traveled was who you were,” and
Lusitania
was meant to attract the era’s wealthy and well connected.
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The funereal gloom of Queen Victoria’s long reign had given way to an age of undisguised pleasures under her son King Edward VII. Aristocrats and millionaires bought their clothing in Belle Époque Paris and dined at Maxim’s or at the Ritz; adorned themselves with tiaras and jewelry from Cartier and Fabergé; “took the waters” at Marienbad, Baden-Baden, and Bad Homburg; and gambled away fortunes at Monte Carlo’s baize-covered tables. They shouted for their favorite horses at Longchamp, Ascot, and the Derby; yachted at Cowes and Kiel alongside Kaiser Wilhelm II; basked in the sunshine of Deauville, Biarritz, and Nice; and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of grouse, partridge, and pheasant at autumn shooting parties on vast country estates. With an almost frenzied delirium, people read Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Rimbaud; took coffee in Vienna’s Art Nouveau cafés; watched the exotic dances of Serge Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes
and Isadora Duncan; and listened to the lyrical and cacophonous music of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky.

Fashionable society was constantly on the move. From New York, London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, they traveled on liners and aboard luxurious private railway cars seeking diversion. An ocean voyage beckoned the elite with promises of romance, glamour, and luxury. It was not uncommon for a First Class passenger to travel with a dozen steamer trunks and pieces of luggage, hatboxes, and jewelry cases. Some brought their own maids and valets to tend to their needs while aboard ship; others refused to travel without their own lace pillows, imported linens, and favorite pets. The most exacting even dispatched cases of wine and champagne, or trunks filled with special delicacies, carefully stowed in the ship’s vast refrigerators so that they could be enjoyed throughout the voyage.
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These passengers wanted all the comforts of their mansions or country estates while at sea; mahogany-paneled drawing rooms, smoking rooms with crackling fires, and immense dining saloons offered elegant reassurance. Those from the Old World appreciated the air of tradition, with an attentive staff of deferential British waiters and stewards to look after them; Americans wanted not merely luxury but the latest innovations at sea: elevators, swimming baths, telephones, and, above all, speed.

Lusitania
had been built to satisfy both the traditionalists and the modernists, though she owed her life to the more prosaic concerns of British pride and maritime supremacy. Since the advent of regular and reliable commercial transatlantic passenger service in 1818, countries and companies had vied with each other to offer the fastest crossing times. Great Britain had seemingly cornered the honor, and few ships proved to be as quick or as reliable as those belonging to the Cunard Steamship Company. Founded in 1838 by Halifax businessman Samuel Cunard to win mail contracts and subsidized by generous governmental loans, the line established an early dominance when, in 1840, its ship
Britannia
crossed the Atlantic in a record twelve days. Her feat won
Britannia
the fabled Blue Riband, an unofficial honor awarded to the fastest crossing between Great Britain and North America. Vessels belonging to the Collins, Inman, and White Star lines challenged Cunard over the next half century, but in the 1890s the company reclaimed its premier position with
Campania
and
Lucania,
ships whose speed cut the time at sea to just over five days.
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Then the Germans entered the game. The first of Queen Victoria’s seemingly endless swarm of grandchildren, Kaiser Wilhelm II had always felt torn between ingratiating himself—often annoyingly—to his British relatives and insisting on Teutonic superiority in all things. Starting in 1898, a string of Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika Line vessels—marked with distinctive paired funnels and larger, more luxurious, and faster than their British counterparts—seized the Blue Riband and threatened perpetual dominance of the transatlantic trade.
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Things came to a head in 1902, when American financier J. P. Morgan purchased a controlling interest in both the Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher Lloyd lines as well as in Britain’s White Star Line for his International Mercantile Marine.
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Soon, Morgan was pressing to buy Cunard—the only large shipping company still exclusively in British hands. The proposal sent shockwaves through the British Admiralty. The Royal Navy needed complete control over a fleet of liners that, in the event of a war, could be requisitioned and converted to troop transports or armed cruisers. With this in mind, the Admiralty partnered with Cunard and subsidized construction of two new liners. Cunard was given £2.6 million, which was to be repaid in annual installments over twenty years at the exceptionally low interest rate of 2.75 percent (the customary rate was 5 percent); in addition, the government would give Cunard an annual operating stipend of some £75,000 for each vessel and another £68,000 for carrying the mail. Provisions in the agreement demanded that the liners be capable of maintaining an average speed of 25 knots; that the Admiralty approve all plans; and that the vessels be subject to government requisition in time of war.
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From 1904 to 1907, work went on at a furious pace. At first,
Lusitania
and her sister ship,
Mauretania,
were to feature only three funnels, in contrast to their German rivals; however, passengers associated speed with the number of smokestacks, and so a fourth was added.
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The Admiralty demanded that all engine and boiler rooms, as well as steering mechanisms, be placed below the waterline, where they would be safe from shelling if the vessel saw military action. There were four boiler rooms situated in the main section of the ship, with the forward space reserved for cargo and the engine rooms located aft. The designers abandoned the customary reciprocating engines in favor of new steam-driven turbines; twenty-five coal-fueled boilers, fired by 192 furnaces, could produce 68,000 horsepower to drive the four bronze propellers—faster than any other ship afloat. Lateral bulkheads divided her into twelve main watertight compartments, any two of which could be flooded without risk to the ship; thirty-five hydraulic watertight doors sealed them off, and a double bottom added further protection. Coal bunkers lined the ship’s hull for two thirds of its length, providing longitudinal bulkheads as an additional safeguard.
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Everything about the finished
Lusitania
was both revolutionary and enormous. More than 4 million rivets studded the 26,000 steel plates composing her 782-foot, 2-inch hull; her anchor chains each weighed just over 10 tons. Over 200 miles of electric wiring snaked through the vessel, supplying power to more than 5,000 individual lights. At 31,550 tons, she became the world’s largest ship, capable of carrying 2,198 passengers and 827 members of her crew.
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On her trials, she managed a record speed of 26.7 knots; vibration from the turbine propellers, though, violently shook the Second Class accommodations located in the stern.
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The space had to be completely redone, with new supports disguised as columns and ornamental arches in a not entirely successful effort to stabilize the accommodations.
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On her maiden voyage in 1907,
Lusitania
barely missed capturing the Blue Riband. She won it a month later, crossing from Liverpool to New York in 4 days, 19 hours, and 52 minutes. Her sister ship,
Mauretania,
bettered even this, though in 1909—after her triple-bladed screws were replaced with four-bladed propellers—
Lusitania
again took the title of fastest ship in the world. Her triumph was short-lived: in a month,
Mauretania
permanently reclaimed the title.
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Lusitania
plied the Atlantic for seven years, collecting accolades and attracting a glittering, international clientele. In time, larger, more luxurious vessels challenged
Lusitania
’s primacy: White Star Line’s
Olympic
and, briefly,
Titanic,
along with Hamburg-Amerika’s trio of massive liners,
Imperator, Vaterland,
and
Bismarck,
and even Cunard’s own
Aquitania
of 1914. Yet
Lusitania
had a special appeal: she was, said one lady, “the most wonderful thing on the sea.”
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She was the floating embodiment of the Edwardian Era’s Indian summer, a halcyon age that seemed destined to last forever.

Then came the summer of 1914, when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his morganatic wife during their visit to Sarajevo. Austrian and Serbian diplomats traded pointed accusations, but few people actually believed that the assassination would lead to anything more dangerous than some incautious saber rattling. After all, they reasoned, there had been no major European war for more than four decades. Austria, not surprisingly, wanted the Serbian government—which had aided the assassination—punished, and appealed to her ally Kaiser Wilhelm II for German support. Serbia, little more than a Russian protectorate, invoked their shared Slav heritage and turned to Tsar Nicholas II. “Willy” and “Nicky” exchanged increasingly frantic telegrams, each imploring the other to exercise restraint as they mobilized their armies. Agreements and ententes steadily pushed nation after nation toward the abyss: by the first week of August, Great Britain, France, and Russia were at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary.