Turner acknowledged the problem. His wartime crews bore no semblance to the sturdy and capable “sailormen” he had encountered earlier in his career. “The old-fashioned able seaman who could knot, reef, splice or steer disappeared with the sailing ships,” Turner said. As to the crew’s ability to handle lifeboats: “They are competent enough—they want practice. They do not get practice enough, and they do not get the experience.”
For this upcoming voyage, however, Turner did manage to hire a number of hands who not only were experienced mariners but had gone to sea as he had done, aboard large square-rigged sailing vessels. One such was Leslie “Gertie” Morton, eighteen years old, close to achieving his second-mate’s certificate, or “ticket.” According to his official seaman’s record, he was five feet, ten and a half inches tall, with fair hair and blue eyes. He also had two tattoos: crossed flags and a face on his left arm, a butterfly on his right. These were important details, should he be lost at sea and his body later recovered. He and his brother, Cliff, had signed aboard a square-rigger, the Naiad, as apprentice seamen, each under a formal agreement that bound them to the ship’s owner for four years. Cliff’s “indenture” was still pending; Leslie had completed his on March 28, 1915.
Sailing ships were still in wide use in commercial trade, even though voyages aboard them were inevitably slow and tedious. The brothers had arrived in New York after what Leslie Morton termed a “particularly vicious passage” from Liverpool that took sixty-three days with the ship all the while in ballast, meaning empty of cargo. They faced worse to come. In New York they were to pick up a load of kerosene in 5-gallon containers and haul it to Australia, then collect a load of grain in Sydney and bring it back to Liverpool. The whole journey promised to take a full year.
The brothers decided to jump ship, despite Cliff’s obligation to serve out his indenture. Both wanted to get home to take part in the war, which they, like most people, expected would end soon. “We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars,” Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the “nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children.”
They planned to travel to England as paying passengers and wired home to ask for money to buy second-class tickets. Their father arranged a transfer of funds by return cable.
The Mortons learned that the next ship home was the Lusitania and bought tickets. They had heard so much about the liner that they felt they had to go to the wharf to see it. “What a sight she presented to our eyes,” Leslie Morton wrote. “She seemed as large as a mountain. She had four funnels and tremendous length and, knowing that she could really move along, we were quite thrilled at the thought of traveling on her.”
As they were standing on the wharf, staring at the ship, they realized that one of the ship’s officers was staring at them. This proved to be Chief Officer John Preston Piper, who had just come down the gangplank to the wharf. “What are you boys looking at?” he asked.
They told him they had booked passage for the ship’s upcoming voyage and just wanted to see it.
He watched them a moment, and asked, “What ship are you off?”
Morton, hedging the truth, told him they had just fulfilled their indentures and were heading back to Liverpool to take their certification exams.
“I thought you looked like seamen,” Piper said. He asked the two why they wanted to pay for their voyage when they could work their way across. The Lusitania had just lost ten deckhands who had quit the ship, apparently to avoid having to serve in the British army. “I could use two boys like you,” Piper said.
“I think there could be more, Sir,” Morton said. “Some of our other shipmates have paid off.”
Chief Piper told the brothers to be at the wharf Friday morning, “with as many as you can get.”
The boys congratulated themselves. Now they could refund their tickets and devote their father’s money to other pursuits. “We blew every penny” and spent Thursday night “in luxurious if doubtful surroundings,” Morton wrote.