Dead Wake

Turner testified that by his own standards he was in midchannel. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he passed the Old Head of Kinsale at distances as close as a mile. Indeed, one photograph of the Lusitania shows the ship steaming at full speed past the Old Head at the maritime equivalent of a hair’s breadth. At the time of the attack, the ship by Turner’s reckoning had been a dozen miles off, maybe as many as 15. (Years later a diver would pinpoint the wreck’s location at 11? miles from Kinsale Head.)