On Saturday morning, reporter Jack Lawrence went aboard as usual, but now with a particular story in mind. He carried with him a copy of the German Embassy’s warning.
Lawrence stopped by the cabin of Alfred Vanderbilt and knocked on the door. Vanderbilt himself opened it, wearing an elegant suit with a pink carnation in one lapel. In the room beyond, his valet was hard at work unpacking a small mountain of baggage. Lawrence had tried to interview Vanderbilt in the past and had typically found it a pointless exercise because the man rarely had much to say. “Alfred Vanderbilt may have been a riot among the ladies,” Lawrence wrote, “but in the presence of newspapermen he was a shy and shrinking violet.”
Vanderbilt commented that there seemed to be an unusual amount of excitement aboard. “Lots of talk about submarines, torpedoes and sudden death,” Vanderbilt said. “I don’t take much stock in it myself. What would they gain by sinking the Lusitania?”
He showed Lawrence a telegram he had received after boarding. “The Lusitania is doomed,” it read. “Do not sail on her.” It was signed “Mort.” Vanderbilt said he didn’t know anyone named Mort but wondered if it might have been an allusion to death. “Probably somebody trying to have a little fun at my expense.”
Out on deck, Lawrence came across Elbert Hubbard, at this point one of the most famous men in America—the soap salesman turned author who had founded a collective in East Aurora, New York, called the Roycrofters, where men and women built furniture, bound books, made prints, and produced finely crafted goods of leather and metal. As an author, he was best known for his inspirational book, A Message to Garcia, about the value of personal initiative, and for an account of the Titanic disaster that centered on one woman’s refusal to enter a lifeboat without her husband; he was headed now to Europe with the goal of interviewing Kaiser Wilhelm. Hubbard was famous as well for coining crisp aphorisms, including “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” He wore a Stetson hat and a flamboyant black cravat—more like a large gift ribbon—and had long flowing hair. When Lawrence approached him, Hubbard was standing beside his wife and eating a large red apple.
Hubbard hadn’t seen the warning. “When I showed it to him he merely glanced at it and went right on chewing his apple,” Lawrence wrote. Hubbard took another apple out of his pocket and gave it to Lawrence. “Here, have an apple and don’t bother your head about those Potsdam maniacs. They’re all crazy.”
Lawrence pressed him. What if the German navy really was planning an attack?
“What’ll I do?” Hubbard said. “Why, I’ll stay on the ship. I’m too old to go chasing after lifeboats and I never was much of a hand at swimming. No, we’ll stay by the ship.” He turned to his wife. “Won’t we Ma?” It was Lawrence’s impression that Mrs. Hubbard did not share his view.
Lawrence discovered that very few passengers had read the German warning. He did not find this surprising. “When you are getting ready to sail on a transatlantic liner at noon,” he wrote, “you seldom have time to sit down and peruse the morning papers.”
Even those who had seen the warning paid little attention. The idea that Germany would dare attempt to sink a fully loaded civilian passenger ship seemed beyond rational consideration. And even if a U-boat did try, common wisdom held that it would inevitably fail. The Lusitania was simply too big and too fast, and once in British waters would doubtless be too well protected by the British navy.
Only two passengers canceled because of the warning itself, a wealthy shoe dealer from Boston, named Edward B. Bowen, and his wife. They did so at the last minute. “A feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the Lusitania,” Edward said, later. “I talked it over with Mrs. Bowen and we decided to cancel our passage—although I had an important business engagement in London.”