Second-class passenger Henry Needham may have encountered the pair, for he recalled that a passenger approaching from the direction of the bridge had shouted, “The Captain says the boat will not sink.”
“The remark,” Needham wrote, “was greeted with cheers & I noticed many people who had been endeavoring to get a place in the boats, turn away in apparent contentment.”
Turner’s words merely confirmed what the passengers and many of the crew already believed, or wanted to believe: that no torpedo could cause the ship mortal damage. The ship’s purser and surgeon spent the moments after the two explosions calmly strolling along the boat deck, smoking cigarettes, assuring passengers the ship was not in any danger. And this seemed entirely plausible. The Lusitania was simply too big and too well built to sink. What made the idea even more incongruous was the setting: a gleaming May afternoon, warm and still, the sea smooth and the headlands of Ireland visible in the distance, so green they seemed to luminesce in the sunshine.
Isaac Lehmann, the New York businessman, did not share this confidence in the ship’s unsinkability. He went to his stateroom to get his life jacket and found that someone had entered his room and taken it. A nervous man, Lehmann feared chaos. “I don’t know what possessed me,” he said, “but I looked in my dress suit case and got hold of my revolver, as I figured this would come in handy in case there was anybody not doing the proper thing.”
THERE WERE shipbuilders among the Lusitania’s passengers, and at first they too believed the ship would remain afloat. One of them, Frederic J. Gauntlett, an executive with the Newport News Ship Building and Dry Dock Company, was on his way to Europe to meet with builders of submarines with an eye to starting a venture in the United States. He was traveling with the company’s president, Albert Hopkins.
Gauntlett was at lunch with Hopkins and another shipbuilder, a Philadelphian named Samuel Knox. (It was Knox’s company that had built the Gulflight, the American oil tanker torpedoed a week earlier.) They sat at their usual table, the sixth one back, on the starboard side. They wore suits; the tablecloths were white, and each table had clear glass vases with cut flowers. Sunlight streamed through the windows.
The room tilted to the right. A vase fell from Gauntlett’s table. “I left my coffee and nuts,” he said, “and rose from the table and shouted to the stewards to close the ports.” As a shipbuilder, he understood the danger posed by open portholes. He shouted half a dozen times. “The stewards evidently had business elsewhere,” he said, “and when they left the dining saloon I followed suit and left the dining room also.”
He and his lunch mates did not themselves attempt to close the ports, and these remained open. Gauntlett went to the coatrack, got his hat, and retrieved Knox’s as well. They walked up three flights to the boat deck.
Gauntlett was reassured that the list seemed to stabilize at 15 degrees. He was convinced the angle would not worsen and “never for one moment supposed she was going to sink.” He said as much to a woman standing nearby, surrounded by her children. She asked him what to do. “I told her there was no danger,” he said; the ship “was not going to sink.”
Gauntlett expected the bulkheads and watertight doors to keep the hull from flooding further, but then he sensed a change. The list became more pronounced, as did the tilt toward the bow, at which point, he said, “I made up my mind that it was up to me to take a look around and see what the trouble was.”
He made his way to the railing at the forward end of the deck and looked over at the bow below. The forecastle was partially submerged.
He went to his room and put on his life jacket.
ALL THE ship’s systems were now dead. The rudder no longer operated. The main electric dynamo had failed. All lights were out; anyone walking along an interior corridor now found himself in blackness. The operator in the Marconi room on the topmost deck switched to emergency power. The two first-class elevators at the center of the ship stalled. According to one account, passengers within began to scream.
The elevator that provided the only access to the ship’s baggage room also stopped. The scores of men working to get passengers’ luggage ready for arrival either were dead from the torpedo blast, or would be soon, as water filled the bow. A fireman who escaped Boiler Room No. 2, Eugene McDermott, described a “rush of water that knocked me off my feet.” Many of the dead crewmen were precisely those who would have been assigned to help launch the ship’s lifeboats.