The physical journey proved especially compelling, in ways I had not anticipated. At one point I found myself aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 in a Force 10 gale during a winter crossing from New York to Southampton. At another, I wound up horribly lost in Hamburg with a German-speaking GPS system that unbeknownst to me had been tuned to a different city but gamely tried to direct me to my hotel all the same. I felt like a character in the Bourne Identity, taking wild turns down alleys and into cul-de-sacs, until I realized no GPS system would ever send a driver the wrong way down a one-way street. My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge. There will always be an England, and I am so very glad.
Along the way came quiet moments of revelation where past and present for an instant joined and history became a tactile thing. I live for these moments. No sooner did I sit down to work at the Hoover Library at Stanford University than an archivist brought me, unbidden, a fragment of planking from a lifeboat stamped with the name Lusitania, originally found beside the corpse of a passenger who had washed ashore. In the Strandingsmuseum St. George, in Thorsminde, Denmark, I was able to stand beside and touch the deck gun of U-20—the actual gun that had sunk the Earl of Lathom—adopting poses that my wife assured me were beyond dorky. At the National Archives of the United Kingdom, in Kew—well guarded by swans—I opened one file box to find the actual codebook, the SKM, or Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine, that had been retrieved by the Russians and given to Room 40 in 1914. One of the most powerful moments came when I was given permission by the University of Liverpool, repository of the Cunard Archive, to view morgue photos of Lusitania victims. The effect of such moments is like sticking a finger in a mildly charged electric socket. It is always reassuring, because no matter how deeply I immerse myself in a subject, I still like having actual, physical proof that the events I’m writing about really did occur.
Strangely, in the week before I sent my initial draft to my editor, the Korean ferry Sewol sank in the Yellow Sea, subjecting hundreds of schoolchildren to an experience very close to that of the passengers on the Lusitania. One morning I finished rewriting a passage dealing with the Lusitania’s severe list and how it impaired the launching of lifeboats, only to visit CNN’s website a few minutes later to read about exactly the same phenomenon occurring with the Sewol.
My voyage on the Queen Mary 2—a beautiful and gracious ship, by the way—brought me invaluable insights into the nature of transoceanic travel. Even today, when you are in the middle of the Atlantic you are very much alone, and far from rescue if something cataclysmic were to occur. Unlike the passengers of the Lusitania, before we left New York we all were required to try on our life jackets. No one was exempted, regardless of how many voyages he or she had already made. This was serious business and, frankly, a bit scary, for putting on a life jacket forces you to imagine the unimaginable.
WHEN WRITING about the Lusitania, one has to be very careful to sift and weigh the things that appear in books already published on the subject. There are falsehoods and false facts, and these, once dropped into the scholarly stream, appear over and over again, with footnotes always leading back to the same culprits. Fortunately, I had a guide to help me through all this, Mike Poirier of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, an amateur historian who very likely knows more about the ship and its passengers than any other living soul, and who read my manuscript for things that might cause Lusitania buffs to howl with laughter. One gets the sense that Mike cares about the “Lucy’s” passengers as if they were his nephews and nieces. His help was invaluable. I was aided as well by another Lusitania aficionado, Geoffrey Whitfield, who gave me a tour of modern-day Liverpool. I must assert, however, that if any errors persist in this book, the fault is solely my own.