“Captain’s compliments,” the quartermaster said, “and he says he wants another of these made.”
The bridge game stopped, Bestic recalled, “and we spent the rest of the 2nd. dog”—the watch from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M.—“trying to remember how it was made.” This was not easy. The knot was typically used for decoration, and none of the men had tied one in a long while. Wrote Bestic, “It was Turner’s idea of humor.”
UNDER TURNER, the Lusitania broke all records for speed, to the dismay of Germany. In a 1909 voyage from Liverpool to New York, the ship covered the distance from Daunt Rock off Ireland to New York’s Ambrose Channel in four days, eleven hours, and forty-two minutes, at an average speed of 25.85 knots. Until then that kind of speed had seemed an impossibility. As the ship passed the Nantucket lightship, it was clocked at 26 knots.
Turner attributed the speed to new propellers installed the preceding July and to the prowess of his engineers and firemen. He told a reporter the ship would have made it even faster if not for foul weather and a head-on sea at the beginning of the voyage and a gale that arose at the end. The reporter noted that Turner looked “bronzed” from the sun.
By May 1915 Turner was the most seasoned captain at Cunard, the commodore of the line. He had confronted all manner of shipboard crises, including mechanical mishaps, fires, cracked furnaces, open-sea rescues, and extreme weather of all kinds. He was said to be fearless. One seaman aboard the Lusitania, Thomas Mahoney, called him “one of the bravest Captains I sailed under.”
It was Turner who experienced what may have been the most frightening threat to the Lusitania, this during a voyage to New York in January 1910, when he encountered a phenomenon he had never previously met in his half century at sea.
Soon after leaving Liverpool, the ship entered a gale, with a powerful headwind and tall seas that required Turner to reduce speed to 14 knots. By itself the weather posed no particular challenge. He had seen worse, and the ship handled the heavy seas with grace. And so, on Monday evening, January 11, at 6:00, soon after leaving the coast of Ireland behind, Turner went down one deck to his quarters to have dinner. He left his chief officer in charge.
“The wave,” Turner said, “came as a surprise.”
It was not just any wave, but an “accumulative” wave, known in later times as a rogue, formed when waves pile one upon another to form a single palisade of water.
The Lusitania had just climbed a lesser wave and was descending into the trough beyond it when the sea ahead rose in a wall so high it blocked the helmsman’s view of the horizon. The ship plunged through it. Water came to the top of the wheelhouse, 80 feet above the waterline.
The wave struck the front of the bridge like a giant hammer and bent steel plates inward. Wood shutters splintered. A large spear of broken teak pierced a hardwood cabinet to a depth of two inches. Water filled the bridge and wheelhouse and tore the wheel loose, along with the helmsman. The ship began to “fall off,” so that its bow was no longer perpendicular to the oncoming waves, a dangerous condition in rough weather. The lights of the bridge and on the masthead above short-circuited and went out. The officers and helmsman struggled to their feet, initially in waist-high water. They reattached the wheel and corrected the ship’s heading. The wave’s impact had broken doors, bent internal bulkheads, and shattered two lifeboats. By sheerest luck, no one was seriously injured.
Turner rushed to the bridge and found water and chaos, but once he assured himself that the ship had endured the assault without catastrophic damage and that no passengers had been hurt, he simply added it to his long list of experiences at sea.
Fog was one of the few phenomena that worried him. There was no way to predict its occurrence, and, once in fog, one had no way to know whether another vessel was thirty miles ahead or thirty yards. The Cunard manual, “Rules to Be Observed in the Company’s Service,” required that when encountering fog a captain had to post extra lookouts, reduce speed, and turn on his ship’s foghorn. The rest of it was luck and careful navigation. A captain had to know his position at all times as precisely as possible, because fog could arise quickly. One instant there’d be clear sky, the next obliteration. The dangers of fog had become grotesquely evident one year earlier, also in May, when the Empress of Ireland, of the Canadian Pacific line, was struck by a collier—a coal-carrying freighter—in a fog bank in the Saint Lawrence River. The Empress sank in fourteen minutes with the loss of 1,012 lives.
Turner knew the importance of precise navigation and was considered to be especially good at it, careful to the extreme, especially in the narrow waters close to a port.