On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray—“rather dull,” as Sumner put it—and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography.
Sumner liked Prichard immediately. He saw him as “such another fellow as myself.” Both were traveling solo, and they were destined to encounter each other often during the voyage. Sumner liked Prichard’s ability to take great delight in life but without intruding on others. He “seemed very pleasant and enjoyed himself in a very quiet manner,” Sumner wrote, “—you will understand what I mean, [he] didn’t go about in a rowdy fashion like lots of fellows do having a time.” A fellow second-class passenger, Henry Needham, said of Prichard, “He was a great favorite on board, he arranged the whist drives & seemed to do most of the work.” A whist drive was a social event during which passengers grouped themselves in pairs and played game after game of whist until one team won.
Now Prichard was on his way back to England for a visit, and according to one of his cabin mates, Arthur Gadsden, he was very excited to be doing so—“counting the time” until his arrival, Gadsden said.
THE TRANSFER of the Cameronia’s passengers took two hours. Although later this delay would prove significant to a degree far greater than its brevity might suggest, for now it was merely maddening. Captain Turner prided himself on his skill at deftly managing the Lusitania’s arrivals and departures, which meant casting off precisely on schedule.
Turner had no concern about the German warning. Shortly before departure, he was standing on the ship’s promenade deck, talking with Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman, when one of the ship-news men—apparently not Jack Lawrence—approached and asked Vanderbilt if he thought he’d be as lucky this time as he had been in deciding not to sail on the Titanic. Vanderbilt smiled but said nothing.
Turner put his hand on Vanderbilt’s shoulder and said to the reporter, “Do you think all these people would be booking passage on board the Lusitania if they thought she could be caught by a German submarine? Why it’s the best joke I’ve heard in many days, this talk of torpedoing the Lusitania.”
Both Vanderbilt and Turner laughed.
ANOTHER DELAY occurred, but for this one Captain Turner was at least partly responsible. His niece, the actress Mercedes Desmore, had come aboard for a quick tour and was nearly stranded when the crew, having boarded all the extra Cameronia passengers, removed the gangway. Turner angrily ordered it replaced so that his niece could get off. The process further postponed the ship’s departure.
One passenger, set designer Oliver Bernard, took note. “Captain Turner,” he wrote, later, “neglected his duty at the wharf in New York at a time when the vessel should have been sailing—by having a relative on board.” By the time Bernard made this charge, he had come to understand what few others seemed to grasp, which was that on this particular voyage, given the convergence of disparate forces, timing was everything. Even the briefest delay could shape history.
THE MEN operating the motion-picture camera outside the Cunard terminal moved it to a higher prospect, apparently the building’s roof, until the camera was at about the height of the ship’s bridge, with its lens aimed downward to capture scenes on the decks below. In the film, passengers crowd the starboard side, many waving white handkerchiefs the size of cloth diapers. One man flourishes an American flag, while nearby a woman props her baby on a deck rail.
A few moments later, a young sailor climbs a stairway to the docking bridge, an elevated, narrow platform spanning the deck near the ship’s stern. He raises a white flag on a pole on the port side, then sprints across to raise a duplicate flag on the starboard side, a visual signal that departure is imminent. Soon afterward, just past noon, the Lusitania begins to ease backward. The camera remains stationary, but the slow, smooth motion of the ship produces the illusion that it is the camera that is moving, panning across the ship’s full length.
A crewman standing atop a lifeboat works on its ropes. A first-cabin steward steps smartly out of a doorway and walks directly to a male passenger, as if delivering a message. At the top of a stairway, staring directly at the camera, is a man the filmmakers instantly recognize, Elbert Hubbard, in his Stetson, though his cravat is barely visible under the buttoned front of his overcoat.
The ship’s bridge now passes by, at camera level, and there is Turner, in frame 289. He stands at the starboard end of the bridge wing. As the ship slides past the camera, the captain, smiling, turns toward the lens and removes his hat, once, in a brief wave, then leans comfortably against the rail.
Once the ship has backed fully into the Hudson, two tugboats gingerly nudge its bow toward the south, downstream, and the ship begins to move under its own power. As the Lusitania at last exits the frame, the wharves of Hoboken become visible in the distance, heavily hazed with smoke and mist.