Captain Turner now ordered him to “steady” the ship, that is, to adjust the wheel to counter the tendency to continue turning once the desired heading was achieved. Johnston gave the ship 35 degrees helm in the opposite direction.
“Keep her head on Kinsale,” Turner said, directing Johnston to aim the bow toward the lighthouse on the Old Head. Johnston echoed the order and began its execution.
This time the helm failed to answer. The ship began to veer, “to pay off,” toward open sea. Johnston attempted to counter the drift. “I was doing all I was supposed to do, steadying the ship,” Johnston said, “but she was swinging off again.” Turner repeated his order for a turn toward shore.
Johnston tried. “I put the wheel round, but she would not answer her helm but kept on swinging out toward the sea.”
Turner told Second Officer Percy Hefford to check the ship’s spirit indicator, a marine version of a carpenter’s level, to gauge the severity of the list.
Hefford called out, “Fifteen degrees to starboard, sir.”
Turner gave the order to close the ship’s watertight doors, below the passenger decks, which were operated with a control along the front wall of the bridge. To make sure the doors really did close, Turner told Hefford to go down into the forecastle and check.
Hefford stopped at the wheelhouse and told Johnston to keep his eye on the spirit indicator and “sing out if she goes any further.” Hefford left the bridge. He did not reappear.
Turner ordered the lifeboats lowered “to the rails,” that is, to a level where they could be safely boarded by passengers. The boats still could not be launched, however, for sheer momentum continued to propel the Lusitania forward, initially at 18 knots. Had the reverse turbines responded, the ship could have been stopped in under three minutes, but now only the drag of the sea could bring it to a halt. The liner moved in a long arc away from shore. The forced flooding continued.
At the wheel, Johnston checked the spirit gauge. The list held steady at 15 degrees.
Turner stepped out onto the bridge wing. Below him, the boat deck was filling with passengers and deckhands. Firemen black with soot worked their way through the crowd like shadows. Some of them climbed out of the ship’s vents.
DOWN IN QUARANTINE, Robert Kay and his mother felt the torpedo blast, which Robert described as a “violent explosion.” This was followed by a second, more muted eruption that seemed to come from within the ship. The lights went out.
His mother was tense but oddly calm, Robert recalled, though she expressed concern that in her condition, so deeply pregnant, they might never reach the upper decks safely.
The door to quarantine was no longer plumb in its frame. They forced it open. The corridor outside was dark, tilted both to starboard and toward the bow.
They moved slowly. Robert tried to help, but “every step was an effort, and our progress was painfully slow,” he wrote. The combined starboard and forward list made stairways dangerous. The Kays held tight to handrails, “but with each moment it seemed that the surroundings became more and more crazily distorted.”
Everyone else seemed to have gone. There was quiet, though now and then Robert heard a shout from far above. With great effort, he and his mother worked their way upward.
Five minutes had elapsed since the initial explosion.
CHARLES LAURIAT returned to deck, carrying all the life jackets he could. He put his on first, then helped others. These were the new Boddy life jackets. If worn properly, they were effective in keeping even an oversized man afloat, comfortably on his back, but Lauriat saw that nearly everyone around him had put the jackets on incorrectly. Cunard had not yet established a policy of having passengers try on life jackets at the start of a voyage. The only guide was an illustrated instruction sheet posted in each room, in the apparent belief that passengers would have the time and presence of mind to read and follow it. The fault in this logic now became evident. “In their hurry, they put them on every way except the right way,” Lauriat wrote. “One man had his arm through one armhole and his head through the other; others had them on around the waist and upside down; but very few had them on correctly.”
Lauriat was standing within earshot of the bridge when he heard a woman call out to Captain Turner, her voice steady and calm, “Captain, what do you wish us to do?”
“Stay right where you are, Madam, she’s all right.”
“Where do you get your information?” she asked.
“From the engine room, Madam,” he said. But the engine room clearly had told him no such thing. Apparently he was seeking to calm the crowd below and avoid setting off a panicked race for the boats.
This was the last Lauriat saw of Turner. Lauriat and the woman now headed back toward the stern, and as they walked they told other passengers what the captain had said.