A SUNDAY AT SEA
AFTER HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH THE THREE BRITISH warships, Captain Turner brought the Lusitania to the speed he hoped to maintain throughout the voyage, 21 knots. He set a northeasterly bearing to begin a “circle course” that would take him across the Atlantic. This being May, when icebergs calved in northern seas, Turner chose the “long course,” which veered farther south than the route followed in late summer and fall. Assuming all went well, Turner would arrive at the Mersey Bar outside Liverpool Harbor shortly before dawn on Saturday, May 8. Timing was crucial. Large ships could cross the bar only at high tide. Before the war, this had posed no particular problem. If a captain arrived too early or too late he could just stop and loiter awhile in the Irish Sea. But now that any such pause could prove fatal, captains timed their arrivals to cross the bar without stopping.
Throughout Sunday, May 2, the ship encountered rain and fog, and seas just turbulent enough to cause seasickness. Many passengers retreated to their rooms, but hardier souls walked the decks, played cards, engaged the ship’s typists for their correspondence, and sipped tea in the Verandah Cafe, a calming gardenlike place with five hanging baskets, six shrubs in containers, and forty other plants in boxes around the room. Some passengers read books on C Deck—also called the Shelter Deck—protected from rain by the underside of the deck above. Passengers could rent deck chairs for a dollar per voyage; another dollar got them a blanket, known in the ship’s vernacular as a “rug.”
At 10:30 Sunday morning, church services began for two denominations: Church of England, in the first-class saloon; Roman Catholic in second. Many passengers slept late, planning to wake at about eleven, in time for lunch.
THEODATE POPE awoke after a difficult night. Her cabin had been noisy, owing to its proximity to the three staterooms booked by the Crompton family, who proved to be a boisterous group, as families of six, including an infant, tend to be. Always prone to insomnia, she found the noise intolerable and asked the purser, McCubbin, to find her a more suitable stateroom. Changing accommodations while under way could be a tricky business, but McCubbin obliged and placed her in a new stateroom three decks up.
SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER William Uno Meriheina, a twenty-six-year-old race-car driver from New York traveling to South Africa as a “special agent” for the General Motors Export Company, got up early and took “a dandy salt water bath.” The tubs on board were supplied with heated seawater. Afterward, he dressed and went to breakfast. “Plenty of seasickness on board,” he noted, in a long day-by-day letter he was writing to his wife, Esther, “but I feel splendid.”
Meriheina—who, except when traveling, went by the name William Merry Heina—had been born in Russia, in the Duchy of Finland (which would become independent in 1917), and emigrated to New York in 1893. He had a fascination with speed and by 1909 was racing cars in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, including one race that lasted twenty-four hours. He was also one of the first drivers to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after it opened in 1909. He survived two crashes, one in which his car, a Lozier, rolled over twice, but left him unhurt. He also tried his hand at flying and survived a collision at an airfield in Garden City, Long Island, in which another aircraft settled on top of his in midair. Once again he emerged unscathed. Said his wife, “A braver man never lived.”
He had chosen the Lusitania because he believed it to be the “safest” ship. In the rush to board and say good-bye to his wife and their daughter, Charlotte, he had not had a chance to open the newspaper he had bought before boarding. It was only when the ship was about fifty miles from New York that he read about the German warning.
He wasn’t worried. Now and then the ship encountered French and British warships. One French dreadnought turned around and followed, but the Lusitania left it behind.
Like other passengers, he was unaware that the liner was traveling at reduced speed with one boiler room closed, despite the obvious visible clue provided by the lack of smoke coming from the fourth funnel. He believed the ship was moving at its top speed of 25 knots and took pride in the pace. “We have passed quite a few vessels bound both ways,” he wrote. “Owing to our great speed we don’t stay in sight of any one ship very long.”