Time zones and sluggish communication made it even harder on friends and kin. Those who could afford the cost sent cables to Cunard with detailed descriptions of their loved ones, down to the serial numbers stamped on their watches, but these cables took hours to receive, transcribe, and deliver. In those first days after the disaster, thousands of cables flooded Cunard’s offices. Cunard had little information to provide.
The dead collected at Queenstown were placed in three makeshift morgues, including Town Hall, where they were placed side by side on the floor. Whenever possible, children were placed beside their mothers. Survivors moved in slow, sad lines looking for lost kin.
There were reunions of a happier sort as well.
Seaman Leslie Morton spent Friday night looking for his brother Cliff on the lists of survivors and in the hotels of Queenstown but found no trace. Early the next morning he sent a telegram to his father, “Am saved, looking for Cliff.” He went to one of the morgues. “Laid out in rows all the way down on both sides were sheeted and shrouded bodies,” he wrote, “and a large number of people in varying states of sorrow and distress were going from body to body, turning back the sheets to see if they could identify loved ones who had not yet been found.”
He worked his way along, lifting sheets. Just as he was about to pull yet one more, he saw the hand of another searcher reaching for the same sheet. He looked over, and saw his brother. Their reaction was deadpan.
“Hallo, Cliff, glad to see you,” Leslie said.
“Am I glad to see you too, Gert,” Cliff said. “I think we ought to have a drink on this!”
As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, “so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.”
That night Leslie had his first-ever Guinness. “I cannot say that I thought much of it in those days, but it seemed a good thing in which to celebrate being alive, having got together again and being in Ireland.”
THE RESCUE SHIPS brought in many of the bodies, but many others were recovered from the coves and beaches of Ireland, as the sea brought them ashore. One man’s body was found on a beach clutching a foot-long fragment of a lifeboat, which later would find its way into the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the wood still bearing the brand Lusitania.
Consul Frost took responsibility for managing the American dead. The “important” bodies, meaning those in first class, were embalmed at U.S. expense. “There was a curious effacement of social or mental distinction by death, and we often believed a corpse to be important when it turned out to be decidedly the opposite,” Frost wrote. “The commonest expression was one of reassured tranquillity, yet with an undertone of puzzlement or aggrievement as though some trusted friend had played a practical joke which the victim did not yet understand.” The unimportant bodies were sealed inside lead coffins, “so that they could be returned to America whenever desired.”
Cunard went to great lengths to number, photograph, and catalog the recovered bodies. Body No. 1 was that of Catherine Gill, a forty-year-old widow; Body No. 91 was that of chief purser McCubbin, for whom this was to be the last voyage before retirement. Nearly all the dead were photographed in coffins, though one lies in what appears to be a large wheelbarrow, and a toddler rests on a makeshift platform. They still wear their coats, suits, dresses, and jewelry. A mother and tiny daughter, presumably found together, share a coffin. The mother is turned toward her daughter; the child lies with one arm resting across her mother’s chest. They look as though they could step from this coffin and resume their lives. Others convey the same restful aspect. A handsome clean-shaven man in his thirties, Body No. 59, lies dressed neatly in white shirt, tweed jacket, polka-dotted bow tie, and dark overcoat. The textures are comforting; the buttons on his overcoat are shiny, like new.
These photographs beg viewers to imagine last moments. Here is Body No. 165, a girl in a white dress with a lacy top. Hair flung back, mouth open as if in a scream, her whole aspect is one of fear and pain. One victim, identified only as Body No. 109, is that of a stout woman who lies naked under a rough blanket, her hair still flecked with sand. Unlike all the other bodies in this collection of photographs, her eyes are squeezed tightly shut. Her cheeks are puffed, her lips are tightly clamped. She looks uncannily as if she were still holding her breath.