“As periscope is submerged for some time after torpedo had been fired, I am sorry to say that I could not ascertain what kind of a miss it was,” he wrote in his log. “The torpedo came out of its tube correctly, and either it did not run at all or at a wrong angle.” He doubted that anyone aboard the steamer even noticed.
Schwieger resumed the voyage home. He surfaced to increase speed and recharge his batteries. From atop the conning tower, he saw the smoke trails of at least six large steamers in the distance, inbound and outbound, but made no further effort to attack. As it was, this would prove to be his most successful patrol. In the course of traveling a total of 3,006 miles, 250 under water, he had sunk 42,331 tons of shipping.
THE STEAMER Schwieger had fired upon was a British oil tanker, the Narragansett, headed for New Jersey, and contrary to what he imagined, everyone aboard was very much aware of the near miss. The ship’s first officer had spotted the periscope, and the captain, Charles Harwood, had ordered a sharp turn and maximum speed.
Harwood reported the encounter by wireless. At the time of the attack he had been responding to an SOS from the Lusitania, and had been racing to the scene, but now he suspected the SOS had been faked by the submarine to lure his ship and other would-be rescuers.
His telegram, relayed to the Admiralty’s War Room in London, read, “We proceeded with all possible speed 3:45 p.m. sighted submarine about 200 yards on our starboard quarter, submarine fired torpedo which passed ten yards astern of us, maneuvered ship and got all clear; submarine was seen astern 10 minutes later 4 P.M.… Saw no sign of Lusitania believe call to be a hoax.”
Captain Harwood changed heading and fled away from the last reported location of the Lusitania.
LUSITANIA
SEAGULLS
HIS LIFE JACKET MADE HIM BUOYANT AND LIFTED HIM from the bridge, but the descending hull pulled him under. “The whole ship seemed to be plucked from my feet by a giant hand,” Turner said. When he came back to the surface, he found himself in an archipelago of destruction and death. “Hundreds of bodies were being whirled about among the wreckage,” he said. “Men, women and children were drifting between planks, lifeboats and an indescribable litter.”
He had done all he could, he believed, and now an instinct to live ignited. He began to swim. He recognized another man nearby, William Pierpoint, the Liverpool police detective. All at once, Pierpoint disappeared. Like newlywed Margaret Gwyer, he was dragged into a funnel. “I thought he had gone,” Turner said. But in a burst of steam and hissing air, Pierpoint popped back out, his body coated with a layer of wet black soot that clung to him like enamel. At which point, Turner said, Pierpoint “started swimming for home like ten men, he was so scared.”
The ship was still moving at about 4 knots, by Turner’s estimate. But as he watched, its bow struck bottom—he was sure of it. “I noticed it because the sinking of the hull stopped for a few seconds with the stern in the air, quivering her whole length of 800 feet, and then down she went.”
It was a strange moment for a sea captain. Twenty minutes earlier Turner had stood on the bridge in command of one of the greatest ocean liners ever known. Now, still in uniform, he floated in the place where his ship had been, in a calm sea under a brilliant blue sky, no deck, cabin, or hull in sight, not even the ship’s tall masts.
He and Pierpoint swam together. Turner saw the bodies of some of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets—he counted forty in all. Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”
Turner spent three hours in the water, until he was pulled aboard a lifeboat, and later was transferred to a fishing trawler, the Bluebell.
MARGARET MACKWORTH’S first recollection, after having lost consciousness in the sea, was of awakening on the Bluebell’s deck, naked under a blanket, her teeth chattering, she wrote, “like castanets.”
A sailor appeared above her, and said, “That’s better.”
She was miffed. “I had a vague idea that something had happened but I thought that I was still on the deck of the Lusitania, and I was vaguely annoyed that some unknown sailor should be attending to me instead of my own stewardess.”