AS MEASLE-POXED Robert Kay and his pregnant mother struggled to ascend to the boat deck, the sounds of commotion above became more and more clear. They emerged to find themselves in a crush of people climbing toward the stern to escape the water ascending the deck. Robert watched people jump from the rails.
The ship continued to move; its stern rose higher. His mother held him close. And then the sea seemed to leap forward, and his mother was gone. They were separated; he was cast into a roiling turbulence. The ship disappeared.
Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.
AS CHARLES LAURIAT watched the ship pass and descend, something struck his head with shocking force. Whatever the thing was, it slipped back onto the shoulders of his life jacket, and caught there, and dragged him under. “I couldn’t imagine what was landing on me out of the sky,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t have been as much surprised if the submarine had risen and I had found myself on her, but to get a bolt from the blue did surprise me.”
He turned his head and saw that the thing that had snagged him was a wire stretched between the ship’s two masts. This, he realized, was the Lusitania’s wireless antenna. He tried to shake it off but failed. It turned him upside down and pushed him ever deeper below the surface.
TELEGRAM
FRIDAY,
MAY 7, 1915
2:26 P.M.
“S.O.S. FROM ‘LUSITANIA.’ WE THINK WE ARE OFF KINSALE. LATE POSITION 10 MILES OFF KINSALE COME AT ONCE BIG LIST LATER PLEASE COME WITH ALL HASTE.”
LUSITANIA
A QUEEN’S END
ONLY SIX OF THE LUSITANIA’S TWENTY-TWO CONVENTIONAL lifeboats got away before the ship made its final plunge; a seventh, from the port side, reached the water, but without a crucial plug. The boat filled, and foundered.
Those passengers who had already jumped from the ship swam to get as far away as possible, for fear that the ship’s descent would generate suction that would drag them down as well. This did not occur, although three passengers did experience a kindred effect. One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot. Two other passengers accompanied her into the funnel—Harold Taylor, twenty-one, also newly married, and Liverpool police inspector William Pierpoint. They too emerged alive, with blackened faces and bodies.
As the ship’s bow nosed down, its stern rose, exposing its four giant propellers, which glinted gold in the sun. By now the Lusitania was 2 miles from the point where the torpedo had struck, and about 12 miles from the Old Head of Kinsale. In these last moments, the angle of starboard list decreased to only about 5 degrees, as water filled the rest of ship.
Seaman Morton turned onto his back and watched. He saw passengers swept from the deck and hundreds of others struggling to climb toward the stern. The Lusitania again heeled to starboard and slipped from view, in “a slow, almost stately, dive by the head, at an angle of some forty-five or fifty degrees.”
Dwight Harris, floating a good distance astern in his Wanamaker’s life belt, watched as the ship “plunged forward like a knife blade into the water—funnels, masts, boats, etc., all breaking to pieces and falling about everywhere! A terrible mass of iron, wood, steam, and water! And worst of all, human forms!—A great swirling greenish white bubble formed where the ship went down, which was a mass of struggling humanity and wreckage! The bubble got bigger and bigger, and fortunately only came to within twenty or thirty yards of me shoving wreckage with it.”
THIS UPHEAVAL was a singular feature of the ship’s demise, commented upon by many survivors. The sea rose as a plateau of water that spread in all directions. It carried bodies and masses of debris, and was accompanied by a strange sound.
Charles Lauriat emerged just as the Lusitania disappeared. By kicking hard he somehow managed to free himself of the antenna wire. “As she went under,” Lauriat wrote, “I was not conscious of hearing cries; rather it was a long, lingering moan that rose, and which lasted for many moments after she disappeared.” Lauriat was overtaken by the wave. “The mass of wreckage was tremendous,” he wrote. “Aside from the people brought out with it, there were deck chairs, oars, boxes, and I can’t remember what. I simply know that one moment one was jammed between large objects, and the next moment one was under the water.”