But the tendrils of conflict seemed to reach more and more insistently toward America’s shores. On April 30, five weeks after the sinking of the Falaba and the loss of American passenger Leon Thrasher, first details arrived in Washington about another attack, in which a German aircraft had bombed a U.S. merchant ship, the Cushing, as it traversed the North Sea. Three bombs fell, but only one struck. No one was hurt and the damage was minor. Just the day before, in another private memorandum, Lansing had written, “A neutral in time of international war must always show forbearance, but never in the course of history have the patience and forbearance of neutrals been put to so severe a test as today.”
He saw grave meaning in the attack on the Cushing. “German naval policy is one of wanton and indiscriminate destruction of vessels regardless of nationality,” he wrote to Secretary Bryan, on Saturday, May 1. But Wilson and Bryan, though troubled by the incident, resolved to treat it with more circumspection, as indicated in a report by the New York Times: “It was not thought in official quarters that any serious issue would be raised, because it is accepted that the bombs were not dropped deliberately, but under the impression that a hostile vessel was being attacked.” This was a generous appraisal: at the time, the Cushing was flying an American flag, and its owners had painted the ship’s name on its hull in six-foot letters.
Another piece of news, more troubling in nature, had not yet reached the Times or the White House. That Saturday—the day of the Lusitania’s departure—a German U-boat torpedoed an American oil tanker, the Gulflight, near the Isles of Scilly off England’s Cornish coast, killing two men and causing the death by heart attack of its captain. The ship remained afloat, if barely, and was being towed to St. Mary’s Island, the largest of the Scillies, 45 miles west of Cornwall.
In Washington the dawn brought only a lovely spring Saturday, with temperatures destined to rise into the seventies and send men to their haberdashers for their first straw “lids” of the season. The crowns of hats were expected to be shorter this year, the brims broader; gentlemen of course were expected to wear summer gloves made of silk, to keep their hands, as one ad put it, “cool and clean.” The day promised to be one in which Wilson could indulge his dream, his hope, of love and an end to loneliness.
LUSITANIA
UNDER WAY
THE SHIP WAS SCHEDULED TO DEPART AT 10:00 A.M., but now came a delay. In wartime, Britain’s Admiralty held the power to requisition for military service any ship under British flag. At very much the last minute, the Admiralty commandeered a passenger ship docked at New York, the Cameronia, which provided service to Liverpool and Glasgow. The Cameronia’s captain received his orders just as his ship was about to depart. Now some forty passengers and their belongings, and five female crew, were to be transferred to the Lusitania. Exactly how these passengers all felt about it, given the morning’s news about the German warning, cannot be known, though at least one account holds that the passengers were pleased, for the Lusitania represented the pinnacle of seaborne luxury and would, they believed, get them to Liverpool much faster than the smaller and slower Cameronia.
Aboard the Lusitania, one passenger, Richard Preston Prichard, took advantage of this delay to unpack one of his two cameras and bring it up on deck so that he could take photographs of the city and harbor. This camera was a Kodak No. 1, which collapsed into a form compact enough to fit into a coat pocket.
Prichard was twenty-nine years old, and stood five feet ten inches tall. His mother and brother called him Preston, possibly to avoid the unfortunate rhythm inherent in saying Richard Prichard. They offered this description of him: “Dark brown hair, with high forehead, blue eyes, and prominent features. Very Deep dimple in chin.” The underlining was theirs, and indeed the cleft in Prichard’s chin was a salient landmark. In another man it might have been disfiguring, but for him it was one feature in an indisputably handsome face, otherwise graced by full lips, dark eyebrows, pale skin, and rich dark hair combed up in a wave from his forehead, all anchored by those blue eyes, so striking in a man with dark hair and brows—“a most interesting face,” one passenger said, “with marked features which any one once seeing could scarcely forget.”
Prichard was a medical student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he had enrolled after trying his hand at various jobs, including lumberjack and farmer. He had moved to Canada after the death of his father, to earn money to send back to his mother in England. He was traveling in second class, room D-90, an interior cabin opposite the Lusitania’s barbershop, and shared the room with three other men, all strangers to one another. He had an upper berth and carried with him three “grips,” or suitcases. He often wore a tie clip with a gold ring inlaid with tiny red and white “lava heads,” decorative faces carved from the kind of lava rock often used for cameos and brooches. He had packed two suits for the crossing, one dark blue, the other a more casual suit in green.