For early risers like the Naishes and Thompsons the sight of this robust warship was a comfort. Its presence affirmed the reassuring remarks Captain Turner had made at the previous night’s concert. Said Mrs. Naish, “We had been told that we were protected all the way by warships, wireless, and that submarine destroyers would escort us in the channel.” By “channel” she was referring to the St. George’s Channel.
The Partridge had no such orders. The destroyer, capable of making over 30 knots, continued past at a brisk pace.
AT ABOUT 6:00 A.M. the Lusitania encountered heavy fog. Captain Turner reduced speed to 15 knots and ordered the ship’s foghorn activated. Like other passengers aboard, the Naishes had a penchant for timing things, a function perhaps of the fact that there was little else to do aboard ship. They clocked the blasts of the foghorn at one a minute. Theodore found the horn unsettling. “I do not like this,” he told his wife; “it is too much like calling for trouble.”
Throughout the ship, passengers awoke abruptly and upon looking out their portholes and windows saw only a milky blur. Charles Lauriat stayed in bed until his usual shipboard wake-up time of eight o’clock, then got up and took his usual sea bath. This morning he had little enthusiasm for the process. “As the horn was blowing and the weather was thick, I returned to my berth for a few hours’ extra snooze. I instructed the steward that if he didn’t hear from me by 12 o’clock he was to call me, as that would give me ample time to get ready for lunch at one.” The foghorn seemed not to bother Lauriat, possibly because of his inside room and its lack of portholes.
Captain Turner placed extra lookouts to watch for other vessels. One of these was Leo Thompson, a crewman assigned “special lookout” duty for the two-hour watch that began at 10:00 A.M. He climbed the ladder to the crow’s nest, about one-third the way up the forward mast. There he and another crewman, George Clinton, were to spend the next two hours staring into the fog, sometimes with marine glasses—Thompson owned a pair of his own—sometimes just with the naked eye. It was tedious but crucial work.
Fog was dangerous, especially in crowded waters like these. But it also afforded protection from submarines. In heavy fog, only chance could bring a submarine commander close enough to a ship to see it through his periscope or from his conning tower, and if he was that close, he was too close, at great risk of collision. As long as the fog persisted, Captain Turner had little cause to worry about U-boats.
At eleven o’clock, the fog began to dissipate.
IN THE crow’s nest Thompson and Clinton now had the extraordinary experience of moving through the dispersing fog as if flying in an aircraft through clouds. At intervals sun warmed their perch and leavened the morning chill. Sometime between eleven and noon, Thompson caught his first sight of the Irish coast. He was able to see it over the top of the fog, but only with his binoculars, and even then the terrain was obscured by mist. What he saw, he said later, was “just the loom of the land through the haze.”
He called out to the bridge below, “Land on the port beam.”
The fog continued to fade, and soon the decks were bathed in a yellowing mist that foretold sunshine to come.
IN LONDON, a mosaic of information had by now accumulated in Blinker Hall’s intelligence division and in Room 40 that showed that only one submarine was in the waters off County Cork, and that it had to be U-20, commanded by Capt. Walther Schwieger, a talented and aggressive commander.
As the morning progressed, more information arrived, in the form of two messages that provided additional details about the demise of the Centurion. The ship had been attacked at 1:00 P.M. Thursday; all forty-four of its crew were rescued after spending ten hours at sea in lifeboats. One message stated, “Number and directions of submarine unknown.”
But by then, news about the attacks on the Centurion, the Candidate, and the schooner Earl of Lathom was already in Liverpool newspapers. Alfred Allen Booth, chairman of Cunard, learned of the attacks while reading his morning paper, over breakfast at his home. The meaning was clear, at least to him. He knew his company’s flagship was due to travel the same waters that very day.