For disbelieving families, struck by grief, it was important to know precisely how their loved ones had died, whether by drowning, exposure, or physical trauma. The Shields family took this to extremes and ordered the body disinterred. The family wanted an autopsy. This was easier asked than achieved. “Needless to say,” wrote Frost, “it proved virtually impossible to procure a physician of advanced years and high standing to dissect remains seventy-five days after decease.” Frost did manage to find two younger doctors who were willing to take on the task. The character of this endeavor was made clear in the report of one of the physicians, Dr. John Higgins, acting house surgeon of Cork’s North Infirmary.
The autopsy began at 2:30, July 23, at the office of an undertaker; the second doctor was to perform his own autopsy the next day. A plumber now opened the lead casket in which Victor Shields lay, and soon the scent of heated lead was joined by another sort of odor. Consul Frost was present for this, but Higgins noted that at a point about halfway through the autopsy he left, “when he was called away.”
In life, by Higgins’s estimate, Shields had weighed 14 or 15 stone, or roughly 200 pounds. His body was now in “an advanced state of decomposition,” Higgins noted. This was an understatement. “The soft parts of his face and head were entirely absent, including the scalp,” Higgins wrote. “The majority of the teeth were missing, including all the front teeth. The hands were also absent, and the soft parts of the upper right arm. The back of the calf of the right leg was largely absent, as was a portion of the left calf. The genitals were very much decomposed, virtually missing.”
Mr. Shields lay there smiling up at them, but not in an endearing fashion. “I examined the skull,” Dr. Higgins wrote. “Externally it was totally bare as far as the lower part of the occipital bone.” The occipital forms the bottom rear portion of the skull. “I removed the skull-cap; and found that the brain was too much decomposed for examination, but the membranes were intact.” He removed the brain and examined the interior of the skull. He found no evidence of fracture at its base or to the cervical canal. This ruled out death by falling debris or other blunt trauma to the head. Nor did he discover any fractures along the spine, or injury to the back. Shields’s internal organs likewise failed to reveal what killed him, but they did provide Dr. Higgins with a look at what remained of the man’s last lunch aboard the Lusitania. “The stomach contained roughly a pint of a green semi-solid mass, apparently semi-digested food, but contained no water as such.”
The lack of a clear cause of death was perplexing. “In my opinion,” Higgins wrote, “there is no injury present which would account for death. There is no evidence of drowning; and the probability is that death was brought about as a result of shock or exposure, probably the former. From the contents of the stomach it would appear that death supervened within a very few hours after his last meal, possibly from two to three hours.”
After all that, the finding was death with no obvious cause. The other physician reached the same conclusion.
The peripatetic Mr. Shields was returned to his coffin and shipped to America. Consul Frost, in a letter to Washington, praised the effort taken by the police after the discovery of Shields’s body. “It would be a most graceful and commendable act if the estate of Mr. Shields should forward from two to five pounds to the sergeant and his colleagues for the excellent spirit in which they discharged their duties.”
The mystery as to what killed Shields remained, leaving the family to wonder what horror he had endured. This same fate fell to nearly all the kin of the dead. There can be no doubt that for many passengers death came suddenly and utterly by surprise. The dozens of crewmen who were in the luggage bay at the time of impact were killed instantly by the force of the torpedo blast, but exactly how many and who they were was not known. Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil’s comedy.
One can only imagine the final minutes of the Crompton parents and their children. How do you save a child, let alone six children, especially when one of them is an infant and one is six years old? None of the Cromptons survived. Five of the children were never found. The infant, Master Peter Romilly Crompton, about nine months old, was Body No. 214.
Cunard chairman Booth knew the family well. “My own personal loss is very great,” he wrote, in a May 8 letter to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner. “We are all at one in our feelings with regard to this terrible disaster to the ‘Lusitania,’ and it is quite hopeless to try to put anything in writing.” Sumner wrote back that the loss of the ship and so many passengers “is sad beyond expression.”