One of the ship’s stewards noted that Prichard left the dining room around 1:20 P.M.
As Miss French was making her way back up the stairs to meet Prichard, she ran into two shipboard friends, who asked where she was going. “I replied that Mr. Prichard was going to present me to my double and passed on. I then joined him and we walked around laughing at the idea. I said to him, I wonder if I could recognize this girl myself.”
They joked as they hunted. The time passed happily, and then it was 2:09 P.M. The sun shone, the sea glittered.
SCHWIEGER ESTIMATED his target’s speed at 22 knots—25 miles an hour—and gauged its range at 700 meters, just under half a mile. If his calculations were correct, the torpedo would strike the ship at an ideal angle of 90 degrees.
At 2:10 P.M. Schwieger gave the order to fire. The torpedo burst from the submarine in what Schwieger called a “clean bow shot” and soon reached a speed of about 44 miles an hour. At that rate, it would reach the target’s hull in thirty-five seconds.
With the sea so smooth, the possibility of the torpedo’s track being discovered was high. Each passing second reduced the likelihood that the ship would be able to turn hard enough and fast enough to evade it, but still, for Schwieger and his men, those thirty-five seconds constituted a long interval.
Schwieger watched through his periscope. He didn’t realize it, yet, but he had erred in his calculation of the target’s speed. In fact, it was moving more slowly than he had gauged—by 4 knots, or roughly 5 miles an hour.
LUSITANIA
BEAUTY
SHORTLY BEFORE TWO O’CLOCK, SCORES OF CREWMEN were gathered in the baggage room at the Lusitania’s bow, on F Deck, half coming on duty, half coming off. The task at hand was to get the thousands of pieces of passenger luggage ready for arrival.
Seaman Morton spent two hours helping load suitcases and trunks onto the electric elevator that provided the only access to the room. The shifts changed at two o’clock—“four bells”—when Morton was to begin a two-hour stint as a special lookout, to watch for submarines. He was assigned to the forecastle, or fo’c’sle, the portion of the main deck just behind the bow.
“At five minutes to four bells,” he said, “I went on deck to put my sweater and gear ready for going on the lookout at two o’clock. My place was extra lookout right up in the eyes of the ship on deck; my responsibility being the starboard side of the bow from ahead to the beam.”
BY NOW the ship had expended about six thousand tons of coal, and the bunkers that ran the length of the hull on both the port and the starboard sides were for the most part empty tunnels, grimed with coal dust and pierced here and there by portals through which men known as trimmers moved the coal to the furnaces.
On the bridge, Captain Turner ordered the helmsman to hold the ship on its course parallel to shore so that his first officer could continue the four-point bearing. The protective screen of fog had by now wholly dissipated.
“All lookouts had been warned to keep a sharp lookout and report anything that appeared suspicious,” said Thomas Mahoney, a seaman who was sharing the noon to 2:00 P.M. watch. “At approximately 1:50 p.m. we spotted an object 2 points on the starboard bow, conical in shape.” It looked to him like a buoy. “We reported it to the officer of the watch and it caused a little commotion on the bridge, over what it might be.”
A seaman named Hugh Johnston, quartermaster, was at this point just taking over the helm, his “trick at the wheel.” The bridge was crowded with officers, who also were changing watch.
Soon after Johnston took the wheel, he heard the cry that something had been spotted off the starboard bow. A number of officers raised binoculars and speculated that the object might indeed be a buoy, or a porpoise, or a fragment of drifting debris. No one expressed concern. “We carried on,” said Johnston.
At two o’clock, Seaman Leslie Morton took his position in the forecastle. He stood on the starboard side. Another seaman scanned the waters off the port side. Four other lookouts were stationed elsewhere on the ship, including in the crow’s nest.
Morton’s brother lay below decks, sleeping, so as to be ready for his own shift later in the day. Half the ship’s crew was still gathered in the luggage bay.
The ship sliced through the calm like a razor through gelatin.
Morton was so intent on doing his job well that he started “seeing a dozen things every few minutes.”