A geyser of seawater, planking, rope, and shards of steel soared upward to twice the height of the ship. Lifeboat No. 5 “was blown to atoms,” one lookout said. The ship continued forward through the geyser, which almost immediately collapsed back onto the decks. Seawater drenched passengers; debris thudded off the shuffleboard courts. The children jumping rope on A Deck stopped jumping.
A hole the size of a small house now existed below the waterline. Its shape was more horizontal than vertical, roughly 40 feet wide by 15 feet high. The effects of the blast spread well beyond this, however. Thousands of rivets and the steel plates they anchored came loose over an area about fifteen times greater than the hole itself; the glass in nearby portholes fractured. Bulkheads were damaged and watertight doors dislodged. The relatively small doors and chambers of passenger ships did not dispel explosive forces as readily as the open holds of cargo vessels and thus were prone to destruction. The Lusitania’s builders had installed these barriers with collisions and groundings in mind; none had imagined that a torpedo might one day be detonated against the hull from underwater.
Just inside the hull, at the point of impact, stood the starboard end of a major watertight bulkhead that spanned the width of the hull, one of a dozen such dividers in the ship. This particular bulkhead also formed a wall between the forward-most boiler room—Boiler Room No. 1—and a large coal storage chamber just beyond, toward the bow, called the “cross-bunker,” the only coal bunker in the ship arrayed across the full width of the hull. The rest were the longitudinal bunkers that ran along the hull walls. At this point in the voyage all the bunkers were nearly empty.
The forward motion of the ship, initially 18 knots, caused “forced flooding,” which drove seawater into the ship at a rate estimated at 100 tons a second. Water surged into the cross-bunker and into Boiler Room No. 1, a cavern that housed two one-ended boilers and two double boilers, and the beginning of a main steam line. Water also flowed into the longitudinal bunkers along the starboard side, nearest the impact zone. As these bunkers filled with water, the ship began to list to starboard. At the same time, the water filling Boiler Room No. 1 and the forward cross-bunker caused the bow to begin sinking. The stern began to rise and the hull to twist.
CAPTAIN TURNER was standing on A Deck, just outside the entry to his rooms, when he heard the lookout’s cry that a torpedo was coming. He saw the track and watched it pass below the starboard rail. There was a brief silence, and then a column of water and wreckage erupted from the sea. The shock of the explosion and the sudden list to starboard threw Turner off balance.
With debris and seawater falling behind him, Turner ran up the stairway to the bridge.
HOW PASSENGERS experienced the blast depended on where they were situated when it happened. The ship was so long—nearly 800 feet—and so elastic that those standing or seated toward the stern, in the second-class smoking and dining rooms and the Verandah Cafe, or on the stern “counter,” where the deck swept out over the rudder, felt it as a dull thud. Oliver Bernard recalled thinking, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Those closest to the bridge felt the impact in a manner more vivid and tactile. “Water, bits of coal, splinters of wood, etc., coming down on our heads!” recalled Dwight Harris. “I flattened up against the side of the ship, but got soaked!”
Preston Prichard and Grace French were happily searching for her “double” when they heard the explosion and felt the ship lurch to starboard. “The ship listed so much that we all scrambled down the deck and for a moment everything was in confusion,” she recalled. “When I came to myself again, I glanced around but could find no trace of Mr. Prichard. He seemed to have disappeared.”
Too frightened to go to her own cabin, Miss French set off to look for a life jacket on deck, apparently unaware that all jackets were stored in passengers’ rooms.
Out came the watches. William McMillan Adams, nineteen years old and always handy with a timepiece, put the moment of impact at 2:05. “I timed everything,” he said, later. When asked why, he replied, “I just did it; I don’t know why.” Charles Lauriat checked his stem-winding wristwatch and pegged the impact at 9:08 A.M., Boston time, or 2:08 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time. Others put the time at 2:10; this would later become the agreed-upon benchmark.