EVEN THOUGH the sinking had occurred so near the Irish coast, there was still no sign that rescuers were approaching. Those passengers in the water came to terms with their situations in varying ways. Rev. Henry Wood Simpson, of Rossland, British Columbia, put himself in God’s hands, and from time to time repeated one of his favorite phrases, “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire.” He said later he knew he would survive—“It is too long a story to tell how I knew”—and that this gave him a sense of calm even when at one point he was underwater, asking himself, “What if I don’t come out?”
He did come out. His life jacket held him in a position of comfort, “and I was lying on my back smiling up at the blue sky and the white clouds, and I had not swallowed much sea water either.” For him, these moments in the water were almost enjoyable—aside from the dead woman who for a time floated beside him. “I found it a most comfortable position,” he said, “and lay there for a bit very happily.”
He pulled the woman’s body to an overturned collapsible and maneuvered her onto its hull, then swam toward another collapsible, this one right-side up and occupied by survivors. There were corpses on this raft as well. An engineer from the ship started singing a hymn, “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow,” Simpson recalled, and noted, “We put a good deal of heart into it.” But upon its conclusion no one tried to sing another. “Then we just waited, hoping that they had been able to get out a wireless for help before she went down. It was beautifully calm, fortunately for us, because a very little would have washed us off. We were better off than the people floating on planks in the water or kept up by their lifebelts, or than the people in the water-logged boat [nearby], which kept capsizing.”
A porpoise—Simpson called it “a monster porpoise”—surfaced “and played near us, coming up with its shiny black skin and triangular fin showing for a moment.”
An hour passed, then two hours. The sea remained calm; the afternoon light shifted hue. “It was a beautiful sunset,” Simpson recalled, “and all so calm and peaceful.”
SURVIVORS DRIFTED—in the water, on boats, on pieces of wreckage—for three hours, in hopes that rescuers were on their way. Had the Juno come, the wait would have been far shorter, the chances of survival much higher. But the Admiralty had adopted a harsh calculus, and indeed no one knew whether the submarine was still in the vicinity or not. Some passengers claimed to have seen a periscope after the Lusitania sank, and feared the U-boat might even now be among them. As one survivor wrote, “I was fully expecting the submarine to come up and fire on the Lucy’s boats or wait until the rescue ships came up and then sink them.”
The first sign of rescue was smoke on the horizon, and then came a long, rag-tag armada of torpedo boats and trawlers and small fishing vessels, these more expendable than the large cruiser Juno. Here were the Brock, Bradford, Bluebell, Sarba, Heron, and Indian Empire; the Julia, Flying Fish, Stormcock, and Warrior.
In Queenstown, suspense mounted. None of these ships had wireless, wrote Consul Frost: “No news could be had until they returned.”
ONCE A LIFEBOAT was emptied, the seamen aboard rowed back to look for more survivors, but as evening approached the retrieval of corpses began to outpace the rescue of living souls. The last vessel to arrive was a shore-based lifeboat, the Kezia Gwilt, with a crew of fifteen. Ordinarily the men would have raised sail to make the journey, but there was so little wind that they realized they could cover the distance more quickly if they rowed. And so they did—some 14 miles.
“We did everything we could to reach the place, but it took us at least three and a half hours of hard pulling to get there only in time to pick up dead bodies,” wrote Rev. William Forde, in charge of the lifeboat. There, in that gorgeous dusk, they moved through the wreckage. “It was a harrowing sight to witness,” Forde wrote, “the sea was strewn with bodies floating about, some with lifebelts on, some holding on to pieces of rafts, all dead.”
LAURIAT AND COMPANY rowed their collapsible boat 2 miles until they came upon a small sail-rigged fishing boat, known in these waters as a fishing smack.
As they approached the vessel, Margaret Gwyer, still coated in soot, saw her husband standing at its rail and called to him. His expression, Lauriat wrote, was “perfectly blank.” He had no idea who this blackened young woman could be.
He recognized her only when the collapsible came right under the smack’s rail, and he was able to look directly into her face. He wept.
It was now 6:00 P.M. Lauriat counted the number of survivors that he and his companions had picked up along the way: thirty-two. Fifty other survivors were already on the smack. Before climbing aboard, Lauriat pocketed one of the collapsible’s oarlocks as a souvenir.