She surfaced and grabbed one end of a board. At first she imagined it was this alone that kept her afloat, but then remembered that she was wearing a life jacket. “When I came to the surface I found that I formed part of a large, round, floating island composed of people and debris of all sorts, lying so close together that at first there was not very much water noticeable in between. People, boats, hencoops, chairs, rafts, boards and goodness knows what besides, all floating cheek by jowl.”
People prayed and called out for rescue. She clung to her board, despite her life jacket. She saw one of the ship’s lifeboats and tried swimming toward it, but did not want to let go of the board and thus made little progress. She stopped swimming. She grew calm and settled back in her life jacket. She felt “a little dazed and rather stupid and vague” but was not particularly afraid. “When Death is as close as he was then, the sharp agony of fear is not there; the thing is too overwhelming and stunning for that.”
At one point, she thought she might already be dead: “I wondered, looking round on the sun and pale blue sky and calm sea, whether I had reached heaven without knowing it—and devoutly hoped I hadn’t.”
She was very cold. As she drifted, she thought up a way to improve life jackets. Each, she proposed, should include a small bottle of chloroform, “so that one could inhale it and lose consciousness when one wished to.” Soon hypothermia resolved the issue for her.
CHARLES LAURIAT swam to one of the Lusitania’s collapsible rafts, floating nearby. This was the one that Seaman Morton had seen fall from the ship. Morton swam to it also, as did shipbuilder Fred Gauntlett. Morton called it “an oasis in the desert of bodies and people.”
The three men stripped off its cover. Other survivors clambered aboard. The canvas sides and seats were meant to be raised and locked into position, but with so many terrified people now clinging to the raft, the men found the task difficult. “We were picking people out of the water and trying at the same time to raise these seats,” said Gauntlett; “most everybody that came on board flopped on the seats and it was practically impossible to get the thing to work properly. We could not get it up far enough to bring the parts home so that they would stay so.”
They tried to persuade people to let go just briefly so the seats could be raised, “but that was impossible,” Lauriat said. “Never have I heard a more distressing cry of despair than when I tried to tell one of them that that was what we were doing.”
They positioned the survivors on the floor of the raft. To Lauriat’s later regret, he became annoyed with one man who seemed unwilling to move from his seat. Lauriat “rather roughly” told him to get off. The man looked up and said, “I would, old chap; but did you know I have a broken leg and can’t move very fast?”
With a great heave, the men managed to raise the seats and the attached canvas sides, but only partway. They jammed pieces of wood into the mechanism to prop them in place.
The collapsible had no oars within, but the men found five floating nearby. Lauriat used one for steering while Gauntlett, Morton, and two other passengers rowed. Lauriat guided the raft through wreckage and corpses, looking for more survivors. Seagulls by the hundreds wheeled and dove. It was startling to see men and women in the water still wearing the suits and dresses they had worn at lunch. The men picked up Samuel Knox, the Philadelphia shipbuilder who had shared Gauntlett’s table. They came across a woman who appeared to be African. Seaman Morton swam to get her and brought her back to the boat. This was Margaret Gwyer, the woman who had been sucked into a funnel and ejected. Lauriat wrote, “The clothes were almost blown off the poor woman, and there wasn’t a white spot on her except her teeth and the whites of her eyes.” He described her as a “temporary negress.”
She revived quickly and brightened the spirits aboard with her optimism and cheer and “her bright talk,” Lauriat wrote.
The boat was nearly full when Lauriat steered it past a dense jam of floating debris. “I heard a woman’s voice say, in just as natural a tone of voice as you would ask for another slice of bread and butter, ‘Won’t you take me next? You know I can’t swim.’ ” Lauriat looked over and saw a woman’s head protruding from the wreckage, her long hair splayed over the surrounding debris. She was wedged so tightly that she could not raise her arms. Even so, she had a “half smile” on her face, Lauriat recalled, “and was placidly chewing gum.”
The men pulled her in, and set off rowing toward the lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, a dozen miles away.