The most unsettling image here is that of Body No. 156, a girl of about three, slightly chubby, with curly blond hair, wearing a pullover sweater with overlong sleeves. What is troubling is the child’s expression. She looks perturbed. Someone laid flowers across her chest and at her side. But she seems unmollified. She lies on a wood pallet, beside what appears to be a life jacket. Her expression is one of pure fury.
Consul Frost found the sight of so many drowned children difficult to expunge from his thoughts. He had a young daughter of his own. “Several weeks after the disaster, one night out at my home, I went into a bedroom with a lighted match and came unexpectedly upon the sleeping form of my own little daughter,” he wrote. For an instant, his mind was jolted back to scenes he had witnessed in the morgues. “I give you my word I recoiled as though I had found a serpent.”
THE SEARCH for bodies still adrift in the sea continued until June, when Cunard suggested to Frost that the time had come to halt the effort. He concurred. The search was suspended on June 4, but bodies continued to wash ashore well into the summer. The later a body was recovered, the higher its assigned number, the worse its condition. Two men came ashore in County Kerry on July 14 and 15, some 200 miles, by sea, from the wreck. One wore a cleric’s clothing and had “perfect teeth,” according to a report on the find, which noted, “Much of the body was eaten away.” The second had no head, arms, or feet, but, like some tentacled sea creature, dragged behind him a full complement of clothing—blue serge trousers, black-and-white-striped flannel shirt, woolen undershirt, undershorts, suspenders, a belt, and a keychain with seven keys. To encourage reporting of new arrivals, Cunard offered a one-pound reward. Frost offered an additional pound to anyone who recovered a corpse that was demonstrably a U.S. citizen.
On July 11, 1915, one American did come ashore, at Stradbally, Ireland. At first authorities believed him to be a Lusitania victim and designated him Body No. 248. He had not been a passenger, however. His name was Leon C. Thrasher, the American who had gone missing on March 28 when the SS Falaba was torpedoed and sunk. He had been in the water 106 days.
The people who discovered remains treated them with great respect, despite their often grotesque condition. Such was the case when the body of a middle-aged man was found on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula on July 17, seventy-one days after the disaster. The currents and winds had taken him on a long journey around the southwest rim of Ireland before depositing him at Brandon Bay, a distance of about 250 miles from Queenstown. His body was discovered by a local citizen, who notified the Royal Irish Constabulary in Castlegregory, 6 miles to the east. A sergeant, J. Regan, promptly set out by bicycle, accompanied by a constable, and soon arrived at the scene, an austere but lovely beach. Here they found what little remained of an apparently male corpse. That the man had come from the Lusitania was obvious. Part of a life jacket was still attached to the body, and another portion lay nearby, marked Lusitania.
There was little question as to his identity. When the officers went through what remained of the man’s clothing, they found a watch, with the initials V.O.E.S. stamped on its case, and a knife marked “Victor E. Shields,” and a letter addressed to “Mr. Victor Shields, care of steamer Lusitania.” The letter was dated April 30, 1915, the day before the ship left New York. In one pocket the officers discovered a copy of an entertainment program from the ship. The documents were soaked. The officers laid them in the sun to dry.
Sergeant Regan noted that the tide was rising quickly, “so I sent for a sheet and placed the body on it and carried it from the tide to a place of safety.” He then cycled to a telegraph office and wired the local coroner, who replied that no inquest would be necessary. The police ordered a lead casket and wooden shell, and by evening Shields was placed in a “Swansdown” robe and coffined within. The undertaker took the coffin to a private home, where it remained until the next day, when police buried it in a nearby graveyard. “Everything was done that could be done by the Police,” Sergeant Regan wrote in a letter to Consul Frost, “in fact they could do no more for a member of their family, and I on behalf of the Police tender Mrs. Shields our sincere sympathy in her bereavement.”