Booth quit breakfast and rushed to see the senior naval officer at Liverpool, Capt. Harry Stileman, and pleaded with him to take measures to protect the Lusitania. Booth urged that a message be sent to Turner, notifying him that the two Harrison Line ships had been torpedoed and sunk. Under war rules, Booth was not himself empowered to send a warning, or any other command, directly to Turner. At the start of the war, all ships of British registry came under the dominion of the Admiralty’s trade division, to give the Admiralty maximum flexibility in commandeering ships for military use, as well as to prevent confusion that might arise if conflicting orders were sent to a ship from both its owners and the Admiralty, a circumstance that Cunard chairman Alfred Booth conceded could be “very dangerous.”
Exactly what else occurred during Booth’s meeting with Admiral Stileman is unclear, but Booth came away believing that a detailed message would be sent and that the Admiralty would order the Lusitania to divert to Queenstown, well short of Liverpool, until the immediate U-boat threat was past.
OFF IRELAND, the Lusitania moved through pockets of fog, but visibility improved by the minute, and the threat of collision rapidly receded. Turner ordered the foghorn deactivated. Now, however, the risk of detection by a submarine increased.
Anxiety on the bridge rose sharply with the arrival, at 11:30 A.M., of a wireless message from the Admiralty, which stated: “Submarines active in Southern part of Irish channel last heard of 20 miles South of Coningbeg Light Vessel.”
The sender added, “Make certain ‘Lusitania’ gets this.”
The Coningbeg Light Vessel was dead ahead on Turner’s course, just before the narrowest expanse—45 miles across—of the St. George’s Channel. The message also indicated there was more than one submarine.
If the submarines, plural, were in fact 20 miles south of the lightship, they were positioned about halfway across the channel. On a clear day—and by now the fog was nearly gone—the smoke from the Lusitania’s three operating funnels would be visible for 20 miles in any direction, meaning a lookout on a submarine at the center of the channel would have an excellent chance of spotting the ship. The warning described the submarines as being “active,” but what exactly did “active” mean?
The message was apparently the product of Chairman Booth’s plea, but it fell short of what he had asked for. Only eighteen words long, it conveyed no details about what had occurred over the previous twenty-four hours. Captain Turner, the one man at that moment who needed details the most, never learned of the loss of the two Harrison Line vessels and the Earl of Lathom.
With the fog now dissipated, Turner brought his speed up to 18 knots. He ordered maximum pressure maintained in his three available boiler rooms in the event a sudden burst of speed became necessary.
AT NOON, as per Charles Lauriat’s request, the steward assigned to his cabin arrived to awaken him. The steward told Lauriat the ship had “picked up Cape Clear,” a familiar landmark at the southwest tip of Ireland, and that the ship’s time had been set ahead to Greenwich Mean Time. Lauriat got out of bed, put on his Knickerbocker suit, and was up on deck by 12:50. He knew the time because he checked his wristwatch, set as always to Boston time, and calculated the Greenwich equivalent.
Lunch for first-class passengers began at one o’clock; he wanted to take a ten-minute stroll first. He noted that the ship seemed to be “loafing along” and saw as well that the results of the mileage pool, posted at noon, showed the ship had traveled only 484 miles. Although Lauriat found this slow, in fact it worked out to an average of slightly more than 20 knots, and that included several hours through fog at 15. Still, this was well below the 25-knot pace he had expected the ship to maintain.
“It was a beautiful day then, light wind, a smooth sea, and bright sunshine,” Lauriat wrote. Along the port side, he saw “the good old Irish Coast.” The coast, though, was still a long way off, merely a green slash on the horizon. The fine weather made Lauriat uneasy. “I thought to myself that if a German submarine really meant business, she would have to wait weeks for a more ideal chance than the present weather conditions. With a flat, unbroken sea, such as that around us, the periscope of a submarine could certainly carry a long distance.”
The smoothness of the sea was the remarkable thing. Lauriat likened it to a pancake; one of the ship’s bellboys said it was “just flat as a billiard table.”
CONNECTICUT PASSENGER Jane MacFarquhar climbed to one of the upper decks and looked out over the glittering seascape. She and her sixteen-year-old daughter had just finished setting out the clothes they would wear upon arrival in Liverpool the next morning. They planned to leave their current outfits behind, on the ship. “The view was grand,” MacFarquhar said, “the sun shining, the water smooth and land visible on either side. As I gazed around the beautiful scene, I thought:—‘Where is this spoken-of danger?’ The end of our voyage is almost in view and we have had no sign of danger whatever.”