Lauriat met Field at his apartment, and there Field handed over the book, a handsome volume bound in cloth and packaged in a “full Levant box,” meaning a container covered in the textured goatskin used in morocco bindings. Lauriat placed this in his briefcase and returned to his sister’s apartment.
AT PIER 54, on Friday morning, Turner ordered a lifeboat drill. The ship carried forty-eight boats in all, of two varieties. Twenty-two were Class A boats of conventional design—open boats hung over the deck from cranelike arms, or davits, strung with block and tackle. The smallest of these boats could seat fifty-one people; the largest, sixty-nine. In an emergency, the boats were to be swung out over the sea and lowered to the deck rails so that passengers could climb in. Once the boats were filled, two crewmen would manage the ropes—the “falls”—at the bow and stern of each boat and through careful coordination lower the boat in such a way that it would enter the water on a level keel. This was like being lowered down the face of a six-story building. Given that a fully loaded lifeboat weighed close to ten tons, the process took skill and coordination, especially in rough weather. But even in the best conditions it was a hair-raising operation.
The other twenty-six boats were “collapsibles,” which looked like flattened versions of the regular boats. Capable of holding forty-three to fifty-four people each, these had canvas sides that had to be raised and snapped into place to make the boats seaworthy. The design was the product of a compromise. After the Titanic disaster, ocean liners were required to have enough lifeboats for everyone aboard. But in the case of a ship as large as the Lusitania, there simply was not enough room for all the Class A boats that would be necessary. The collapsibles, however, could be tucked underneath and lowered from the same davits after the regular boats were launched; in theory, they could also float free when a ship sank. The designers, however, seemed not to have taken into consideration the possibility that the boats might end up in the water before being properly rigged, with scores of panicked passengers hanging on and blocking all efforts to raise the sides. Taken together, the Lusitania’s lifeboats could seat as many as 2,605 people, more than enough capacity for all the ship’s passengers and crew.
For the Friday drill, the ship’s men were mustered on the boat deck, and the conventional boats were swung out from the hull. The boats on the starboard side were swung out over the wharf, but ten on the port side were lowered to the water, and several were rowed a distance from the ship. All were then raised back to the deck and returned to their positions.
It was Turner’s belief, as he told his questioners during that morning’s Titanic deposition, that an experienced and competent crew, operating in calm weather, could launch a boat in three minutes. But as he well knew, mustering such a crew was by now a near impossibility. The war had created shortages of labor in every industry, but especially shipping, with the Royal Navy drawing off thousands of able-bodied seamen. What made raising a crew even harder for Turner was the fact that Cunard’s original deal with the Admiralty required that all the ship’s officers and at least three-quarters of its crew had to be British subjects.
The unskilled character of Britain’s wartime merchant crews was sufficiently pronounced that it drew the attention of U-boat commander Forstner, the man who had sunk the Falaba. He noted “the awkward way the men usually handled the lifeboats.” Passengers also took notice. James Baker, a trader of oriental carpets, came to New York aboard the Lusitania earlier in the year, the first crossing with Captain Turner back in command. Baker idled away a portion of the first day of the voyage just watching the crew at work. His conclusion: “Some of them, I do not think could have been to sea before.” He was struck by the haphazard way most of the men dressed. “The crew, with the exception of 4 or 5 … were in all sorts of costumes, confirming my first impression that outside of a few permanent men the balance of the crew were the type one sees on a tramp, a disgrace to such a ship.”