DWIGHT HARRIS swam from the ship. “I had no feeling of fear when I went overboard.” He felt as comfortable as if he had simply entered a swimming pool—so composed that when he came across a floating book, he picked it up and examined it.
The Lusitania moved past. “I was carried by the whole length of the ship and saw everything that happened!—The first life boat (starboard side) was in the water with only two sailors in it. They called to me to swim to it, but I kept on. The second boat was suspended and hanging straight down, the ropes at one end having jammed; the third and fourth boats were crowded with people.”
He saw that the sea was now level with the bridge. As the ship passed him, its stern rose into the air.
FOR THE FAMILY of Joseph Frankum, of Birmingham, England, traveling with his wife, three-year-old daughter, and two sons, ages five and seven, these last moments were terrifying. Frankum gathered them all in a lifeboat on the port side, at the stern. The boat still hung from its davits, but Frankum hoped it would float free when the sea arrived.
The view downhill was of chaos and death, punctuated with eruptions of black smoke as boilers exploded in succession. The mounting air pressure in the hull caused portholes to burst and seams and apertures to howl.
But, strangely, there was also singing. First “Tipperary,” then “Rule, Britannia!” Next came “Abide with Me,” but it was so moving and so sad that women began to cry, and the singers switched to “Pull for the Shore,” and then another round of “Rule, Britannia!”
Frankum said, “I clung to my wife and children and held them tight.”
MARGARET MACKWORTH stayed with the ship, on the boat deck, next to Dorothy Conner. Conner’s brother-in-law was somewhere below, looking for life jackets. A strange calm settled over the deck. People moved “gently and vaguely,” Mackworth recalled. “They reminded one of a swarm of bees who do not know where the queen has gone.”
For a moment, the ship seemed about to right itself. Word spread that the crew had at last been able to close its watertight bulkheads and that the danger of sinking was past. Mackworth and Conner shook hands. “Well, you’ve had your thrill all right,” Mackworth said.
“I never want another,” Conner said.
Conner’s brother-in-law returned. He had been unable to reach his cabin because of water in the corridor but had managed to find jackets elsewhere. The three put them on. Mackworth released the hook on her skirt, to make it easier to take off later if the need arose.
The ship’s list returned, steeper than before. Seventeen minutes had elapsed since impact. They resolved to jump. The idea terrified Mackworth. She chided herself on this, “telling myself how ridiculous I was to have physical fear of the jump when we stood in such grave danger as we did.”
Conner and her brother-in-law moved to the rail. Mackworth held back.
Conner wrote, “One gets very close in three minutes at such a time, and just before we jumped I grabbed her hand and squeezed to try and encourage her.”
But Mackworth stayed behind. Her last recollection was of water up to her knees, and the ship sliding away, pulling her down.
THEODORE AND Belle Naish, the Kansas City couple who just hours earlier had been admiring the sunrise from the ship’s top deck, also stood at the rail. They wore life jackets and stood arm in arm, talking quietly. Having watched one lifeboat dump its occupants into the sea, they made no effort to get into another. A member of the crew told them, “She’s all right, she will float for an hour.” But Belle did not believe him. She’d been watching the rail and the horizon line. The changing differential told her the ship was sinking quickly. She said, “We’ll be gone in a minute.”
She took her arm from Theodore’s, so as not to drag him under. “We watched the water, talked to each other; there seemed to be a great rush, a roar and a splintering sound, then the lifeboat or something swung over our heads.” The boat struck her and cut her scalp. She held out an arm to protect Theodore. A sudden shift in the deck brought water to her armpits. “It seemed as if everything in the universe ripped and tore.”
And then she was deep underwater—by her estimate, 20 or 30 feet. She looked up and saw the brilliant blue of the sky through the water. “I thought about how wondrously beautiful the sunlight and water were from below the surface,” she wrote. She was not afraid. “I thought, ‘Why, this is like being in my grandmother’s feather bed.’ I kicked, and rose faster.”
Her head struck something, and continued to bump against it. “I put up my right hand, saw the blue sky and found myself clinging to the bumper of life boat 22.” A man reached for her. She was so grateful she asked him to write his name on the inside of her shoe, “lest in the experience to follow I might forget.”