There was another dimension to the problem. The time was now just past noon. No matter what speed Turner traveled, he would end up having to pass through the St. George’s Channel at night, with fog an ever-present danger. As it was, the fog that had enclosed the ship all morning had left Turner with a less precise sense of his location than he would have liked. Compounding this imprecision was the fact that he was farther from the coast than usual—about 20 miles, when in fine weather he might come as close as 1 mile.
He called his two most senior officers to the bridge, Staff Captain Anderson and First Officer John Preston Piper, to ask their advice, and at length reached a decision. First, he would pinpoint his location. The Irish coast was by now visible, but the ship’s distance from shore was difficult to reckon precisely. Being a sailor of the old school, Turner liked to use a procedure known as a four-point bearing. This would require him to run parallel to the coast at a steady speed for roughly thirty minutes while First Office Piper took four bearings off a single shore landmark, in this case the lighthouse atop the Old Head.
Once Turner knew his precise position, he planned to maintain a speed of 18 knots so that he would arrive at the Mersey Bar early the next morning, at just the right time to enter the harbor without pause. Though slower than the 21 knots his three operating boiler rooms would allow, it was still faster than any other merchant ship then in service and certainly faster than any submarine. Turner planned as well to alter his course later in the day to bring the Lusitania closer to shore, so that he would pass near the Coningbeg Light Vessel before entering the narrowest portion of the St. George’s Channel. He understood that this contravened the Admiralty’s advisory that captains pass lightships and other navigational markers at “midchannel.” But the Admiralty had reported submarines 20 miles south of the lightship, a location that any mariner traversing that 45-mile-wide stretch would have described as midchannel. To follow the Admiralty’s advisory would have meant sailing directly toward the waiting submarines.
At about 1:30 P.M. Captain Turner ordered the officer at the helm to make a turn to starboard, to bring the ship in line with the coast, so that Piper could take the first of the four bearings. This turn and several previous course changes persuaded some passengers that Turner was directing the ship on a zigzag course to evade submarines, though in fact he was not. Paradoxically, owing to the shape of the coastline, the turn would have seemed to passengers like a turn toward open sea.
Measles-wracked Robert Kay peered through his porthole in quarantine. The Bronx boy, now spotted and enflamed, watched the world pass, his only diversion. The day outside was full of sunshine and sparkle, the Irish coast a vivid green. But as he watched, the ship began its turn to starboard, and to his great disappointment the land began to recede.
THAT MORNING “Champagne King” George Kessler followed through on his decision to talk to Captain Turner about including passengers in the ship’s drills. The two men smoked as they talked.
Kessler wrote, “I suggested that the passengers should be given tickets with a number denoting the number of the boat they should make for in case anything untoward happened, and that it seemed to me this detail would minimize the difficulties in the event of trouble.”
Turner told him that the idea had come up in the wake of the Titanic disaster but that Cunard had rejected it as “impractical.” He added that he did not have the authority to institute the practice on his own without first getting approval from the Admiralty’s Board of Trade.
The conversation shifted to “the torpedo scare which neither of us regarded as of any moment,” Kessler recalled. Turner may have downplayed his own concerns to put Kessler at ease.
JUST AS Pilot Lanz arrived at U-20’s periscope, Schwieger saw the giant steamer change course again, this time to starboard. “She was coming directly at us,” Schwieger told Valentiner. “She could not have steered a more perfect course if she had deliberately tried to give us a dead shot.”
The time was 1:35 P.M. The ship’s new heading suggested it was bound for Queenstown. Schwieger set a course that would put U-20 in front of the ship, at a 90-degree angle. He ordered full ahead, and for the next twenty-five minutes sped forward on an intersecting course, as the ship grew steadily larger in his viewfinder. “A short fast run, and we waited,” he told Valentiner.
Although this patrol had affirmed Schwieger’s distrust of torpedoes, he had no choice but to use one. His deck gun would have been useless against such a large vessel, and dangerous, for after the first couple of shells the big ship likely would have turned and run, or even attempted to ram his boat. Schwieger selected a G6 torpedo.
Within the submarine the tension mounted. All the ship had to do was make another turn, away from U-20, and the chase would be over. Queenstown was near. There was also the possibility the ship’s lookouts would spot Schwieger’s periscope and that its captain would summon a pride of destroyers.