A lot of her friends and family knew she was sailing that day on the Lusitania. “My!” she wrote. “The mail I got today. The steward who was giving it out was amused. He said it might be my birthday.” Friends and relatives had sent her letters and gifts. “I had a pair of silk stockings from Prue and a piece of silk from Aunt Ruth and a rose. I had cards from Nellie Casson, Will Hobson, Tom, Edith Klaas and a nice letter from Lu which I’m going to answer.”
Some were concerned about her voyage. “I’m so surprised to hear that Will and Bee cried, I didn’t think it would worry them.” She herself hated to cry, but, she wrote, “I’ve felt like doing it quite a lot since I’ve left.”
UPON ENTERING international waters, Turner slowed the ship. In the distance, three large vessels materialized from the haze. These were British warships, stationed there to keep the Vaterland and the other German liners locked in New York Harbor. Turner ordered “full astern” to bring the Lusitania to a complete stop.
Two of the three ships were cruisers, HMS Bristol and Essex; the third was the Caronia, a Cunard liner converted to military use and now heavily armed. Turner had once been its captain. The two cruisers lay off the Lusitania’s starboard side, the Caronia off the port, each at a distance of about a “cable’s length,” equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile, or roughly 600 feet. All three warships lowered a small boat, and the sailors in each began rowing toward the Lusitania, through “swirling mist-veils,” as Capt. James Bisset, the Caronia’s master, recalled. The boats carried mail bound for England. “There was scarcely a breeze to ruffle the surface of the ocean,” Bisset wrote. “A light mist clung around the ships, like a shroud.”
Bisset spotted Captain Turner on the bridge, and Staff Captain Anderson. He knew the two men well. Some years earlier Bisset had served under both as junior third officer on the Umbria, an older passenger liner.
Turner and Anderson stepped out onto the port-side wing of the bridge and waved to the officers on the Caronia’s bridge. Everyone seemed to know one another, having served under, beside, or over one another through the years. After Turner and Anderson went back inside the bridge, the Lusitania’s second officer, Percy Hefford, appeared on the port wing. “He was a special friend of mine,” Bisset recalled. Before both joined Cunard, they had served together on an ancient tramp steamer. The thing Hefford had wanted most was to serve aboard the Lusitania. “Now, there he was,” Bisset wrote.
The two men used their arms to semaphore greetings and good-byes.
“Cheerio!”
“Good luck!”
“Good voyage!”
After the boats pulled away to return to their respective ships, Captain Turner gave the order for maximum speed. Full ahead. The Lusitania’s giant propellers raised a Niagara of water at the stern, and the ship began to move. Turner sounded his foghorn three times, the “Sailor’s Farewell.”
Ordinarily, all the Lusitania’s furnaces and boilers would be fully engaged during a crossing, with all four funnels belching smoke, but the war had caused a decline in travel so dramatic that Cunard had been compelled to seek cost reductions wherever it could find them. Turner was under orders issued the preceding November to run the ship using only three of its four boiler rooms, for a savings of 1,600 tons of coal per trip. But this also reduced the ship’s maximum speed by 16 percent, from 25 knots to 21, ironic considering the ship’s original mandate. Though seemingly a modest reduction, it nonetheless cut the distance the Lusitania could travel each day by 100 nautical miles, adding one full day to a transatlantic crossing.
A man aboard one of the warships took a photograph, believed to be the last ever taken of the Lusitania, which showed the ship steaming off into the mist-shrouded Atlantic, smoke pouring from just three funnels. Cunard did not publicize the change, and few, if any, passengers knew it had been made.
ROOM 40
CADENCE
INTERCEPTED POSITION REPORTS: U-20
SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1915
2:00 A.M.: “IN 25D AREA 7 (55.21 N [LATITUDE] 3.15 E [LONGITUDE])”
4:00 A.M.: “IN 157A AREA 5 (55.39 N 2.45 E)”
6:00 A.M.: “IN 124A AREA 5 (55.51 N 2.15 E)”
8:00 A.M.: “IN 59A AREA 5 (56.15 N 1.18 E)”
REPORTS CEASE.
PART II
JUMP ROPE AND CAVIAR
U-20
“THE BLIND MOMENT”
BY 8:25 A.M., SUNDAY, FAIR ISLE WAS VISIBLE 3 SEA MILES ahead, to starboard, but Schwieger could not yet make out the “Mainland” of the Orkneys archipelago, off the northernmost tip of Scotland, which by now he expected to see off his port side. The Mainland was the largest island in the Orkneys and had the highest elevation.
On this third day of the cruise, there was new tension in the boat. U-20 was about to leave “Bright Hans” behind and enter the closely watched waters of the North Atlantic, north of Scotland, in the vicinity of the big British base at Scapa Flow. Schwieger could not have been surprised, therefore, when just after logging his location, he spotted two destroyers in the distance, moving with a deliberation that suggested they were on patrol.