Within seconds Lauriat felt the ship roll to the right and tilt toward the bow. “You could feel the two separate motions very distinctly,” Lauriat wrote. “It seemed as if she were going down at once, but then she stopped suddenly as if the sea had met the watertight bulkheads and she seemed to right herself and even raise her bow a little. This gave me a feeling of security, and I at first thought she would stay afloat.”
Moments later a second explosion occurred. (The ever-precise William McMillan Adams timed this at thirty seconds after the first.) Its character was different. Where the first had been a single, sharp detonation, this one, Lauriat said, was “very muffled.” A shudder traveled the length of the ship and seemed to rise from deep within the hull, “more like an explosion of a boiler, I should think,” said Lauriat. He was unable to identify the location with any precision. The sound was not “distinct enough,” he said.
In the dining rooms, the plants set out on tables shifted; glassware fell to the floor.
MARGARET MACKWORTH and her father, D. A. Thomas, having finished lunch, were about to enter the elevator on D Deck when Thomas joked, “I think we might stay up on deck to-night to see if we get our thrill.”
Before Mackworth could answer, she heard a dull explosion, not loud, more a heavy thud that rose from somewhere below. “I turned and came out of the lift; somehow, the stairs seemed safer.”
Her father set off to try to learn more about what had happened. Mackworth, in accord with her earlier plan, went straight to her room on B Deck to get her life jacket. The degree of list made progress difficult. She moved along the lower side of the passage in the angle between wall and floor and collided with an oncoming stewardess. The two, Mackworth wrote, “wasted a minute or so making polite apologies to each other.”
After retrieving her life jacket, Mackworth ran to her father’s cabin and got one for him as well. She climbed to the open boat deck and moved to the higher side—the port side—judging it safer to be “as far away from the submarine as possible.”
There she encountered her tablemate Dorothy Conner, and asked if she could stand with her while she waited for her father. She put on her life jacket.
A crowd of third-class passengers emerged from below, with great energy and noise.
Mackworth turned to Conner and said, “I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair.”
“So did I,” Conner replied, “but I’ve learnt a devil of a lot in the last five minutes.”
CHARLES LAURIAT was standing next to Elbert Hubbard and his wife. He urged them to go to their room and get their life jackets, but the couple seemed paralyzed. “Mr. Hubbard stayed by the rail affectionately holding his arm around his wife’s waist, and both seemed unable to act.”
Lauriat told Hubbard, “If you don’t care to come, stay here and I will get them for you.” Lauriat set off for his own quarters.
For the many parents aboard, the blast brought a unique sort of terror. The Cromptons of Philadelphia had six children scattered over the ship; the Pearl family of New York had four. The ship was immense, and older children had the run of its decks. Parents were compelled to hunt for their children among the ever-growing crowds of passengers swarming the boat deck, while at the same time holding babies and corralling toddlers.
Norah Bretherton, the thirty-two-year-old wife of a journalist in Los Angeles, had booked passage aboard the Lusitania so that she could bring her two children, Paul and Elizabeth, to meet her parents in England. Paul was three years old; Elizabeth—“Betty”—was one and a half. Bretherton, pregnant, was traveling alone with the children because her husband had to stay behind in California to work.
Her cabin was a second-class room toward the stern of C Deck, the shelter deck. Before lunch she had dropped her daughter off at a “play yard” on the deck above, then placed her son in the cabin for a nap and left him there.
When the torpedo struck, she was in a stairwell between the two decks. She froze. She had no idea where to go first—up one deck to retrieve her baby girl, or down a deck to get her napping son? All lamps went out. The sudden list of the ship threw her from one side of the stairwell to the other.
She ran for the baby.
ON ENTERING the bridge, Captain Turner began issuing commands. He ordered the engines “full astern.” The reverse turbines were the ship’s brakes, the only way to bring it to a stop, and the ship had to be stopped before any lifeboats could be launched with safety. The engines did not respond.
Turner told the helmsman, Quartermaster Hugh Johnston, to turn the ship hard toward the coast, still a dozen miles off. If worst came to worst, he would beach the ship and at least eliminate the danger of sinking.
Johnston stood inside the wheelhouse, a small enclosure within the bridge. He repeated Turner’s command to confirm that he understood. He rotated the wheel to produce what should have been a 35-degree turn toward shore.
“All right, boy,” Turner said.
The ship responded, according to Johnston.