Countless souls struggled in the sea around him. There was little he could do beyond shoving an oar or some other piece of floating debris in their direction. Many passengers wore heavy coats; women wore multiple layers of clothing—corsets, camisoles, petticoats, jumpers, furs—and all these quickly became sodden and heavy. Passengers without life jackets sank. The complicated clothing of children and infants bore them under as well.
One of the most disconcerting sights reported by survivors was of hundreds of hands waving above the water, beseeching help. But soon there was quiet. Survivors reported seeing a plume of smoke from a steamer to the south, but it came no closer. The time that had elapsed since the impact of the torpedo was eighteen minutes.
Seagulls came now and moved among the floating bodies.
CAPTAIN TURNER was still on the bridge as the navigation deck submerged. The sea in the distance was a shimmery blue, but up close, green and clear. The sun penetrating the upper strata of water caught the paint and brightwork of the deck as it fell away below him.
Helmsman Hugh Johnston saw Turner on the bridge wing, moving from port to starboard and back, wearing a life jacket but otherwise making no attempt to dodge the customary fate of a sea captain. Johnston said, later, that he’d “never met anyone as ‘cool’ ” as Turner.
The ship at that point was still moving, but slowly, with a wake full of wreckage and corpses spreading behind it, fed by the hundreds of men, women, and children who through accident or fear had remained on the ship. They streamed off like the knots in a kite’s tail.
AT 2:33 P.M., the wireless station at the Old Head of Kinsale sent the Admiralty a two-word message: “ ‘Lusitania’ sunk.”
Observers on the Old Head had seen it happen. A great ship, present one moment, gone the next, leaving what appeared at a distance to be an empty blue sea.
Captain Turner’s pocket watch, which would eventually make its way into a Liverpool museum, stopped at 2:36:15.
ALL POINTS
RUMOR
THE AMERICAN CONSULATE IN QUEENSTOWN, IRELAND, was located in a suite of rooms above a bar, overlooking the harbor. Behind the building stood the great spire of St. Colman’s Cathedral, which dwarfed every other structure in town. That afternoon, Consul Wesley Frost was at work revising his annual report on commercial conditions in various Irish counties when, at 2:30, his vice-consul came pounding up the stairs to report a fast-spreading rumor that a submarine had attacked the Lusitania.
Frost walked to the windows and saw an unusual surge of activity in the harbor below. Every vessel, of every size, seemed to be leaving, including the big cruiser Juno, which had arrived only a short while earlier. Frost counted two dozen craft in all.
He went to his telephone and called the office of Adm. Charles Henry Coke, the senior naval officer for Queenstown, and spoke to the admiral’s secretary. Frost chose his words with care, not wishing to appear to be a dupe of someone’s practical joke. He said, “I hear there is some sort of street rumor that the Lusitania has been attacked.”
The secretary replied, “It’s true, Mr. Frost. We fear she is gone.”
Frost listened in a daze as the secretary told him about the SOS messages and the report from eyewitnesses on Kinsale Head confirming the disappearance of the ship.
After hanging up, Frost paced his office, trying to absorb what had occurred and thinking about what to do next. He telegraphed the news to U.S. ambassador Page in London.
ADMIRAL COKE had dispatched all the rescue craft he could, including the Juno, and telegraphed the Admiralty that he had done so.
The Juno was the fastest ship available. Queenstown was two dozen miles from the reported site of the attack. Most of the smaller vessels would be lucky to cover that distance in three or four hours; given the calm air, sail-powered craft would take even longer. The Juno, capable of making 18 knots, or 20 miles an hour, could do it in just over one hour. Its crew moved with great haste, and soon the old cruiser was under way.
But the Admiralty fired back a reply: “Urgent: Recall Juno.” The order was a direct offspring of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue disaster: no large warship was to go to the aid of victims of a U-boat attack. The risk was too great that the submarine might still be present, waiting to sink ships coming to the rescue.
Coke apparently had second thoughts of his own, for even before the Admiralty’s message arrived he ordered the Juno back into port. His rationale for deciding to recall the ship did not conform to the Admiralty’s, however. After dispatching the Juno, he explained, “I then received a telegram stating that the Lusitania had sunk. The urgent necessity for the Juno no longer obtaining I recalled her.”
This was curious logic, for the “urgent necessity” was if anything far greater, with hundreds of passengers and crew now adrift in 55-degree waters. It testified to the importance the Admiralty placed on protecting its big warships and heeding the hard lesson taught by the Aboukir disaster, to never go to the aid of submarine victims.