BY TWO O’CLOCK the second-class passengers assigned to the second lunch seating were midway through their meals. First-class passengers rode between decks aboard the ship’s two electric elevators, which were powered by the ship’s dynamo. A group of children was jumping rope on an upper deck with the help of a member of the engineering crew, John Brennan, a trimmer.
The weather by now was perfect, the day vividly clear—so lovely that families from Queenstown and Kinsale had gathered on the Old Head to picnic in the balmy air and watch the passage of ships. They could just see the Lusitania, about 20 miles off, her funnels pouring smoke into the sky.
For Morton, in the ship’s “eyes,” the vista off to starboard toward open sea was clear and bright. “At ten minutes past two,” he said, “I looked at my watch and putting it into my pocket, I glanced round the starboard side and, as roughly as I could judge, I saw a big burst of foam about 500 yards away, four points on the starboard bow.” It looked to him like a giant bubble bursting onto the surface.
An instant later, he saw something moving across the flat plane of the sea, a track, as clear as if it had been made by “an invisible hand with a piece of chalk on a blackboard.”
He reached for his megaphone.
CAPTAIN TURNER left the bridge and went below to his quarters. At about 1:30, Quartermaster Johnston, no longer at the wheel, was sent below to give Turner a message that the Old Head of Kinsale was now “10 points on the port bow and 20 miles away.” The ship’s course was taking it gradually closer to the coast.
Johnston returned to the bridge. Half an hour later, just after two o’clock, he heard the cry, “Here is a torpedo coming.”
AFTER FINISHING lunch and parting from his friend Lothrop Withington, Charles Lauriat went down to his cabin to get a sweater. He put it on under the jacket of his Knickerbocker suit, then headed back up for “a real walk.” He climbed the main companionway and walked out onto the port side of the ship, with the Irish coast visible in the distance. Here he ran into Elbert Hubbard, the writer, and his wife, Alice. Hubbard joked that he probably would not be welcome in Germany, given a pamphlet he had written, entitled Who Lifted the Lid Off Hell?, in which he laid blame for the war on Kaiser Wilhelm. He had given Lauriat a copy earlier in the voyage. Lauriat described it as “a piece of vitriolic English.”
On B Deck, starboard side, Theodate Pope stood beside her companion, Edwin Friend, leaning on the rail and admiring the sea, “which was a marvelous blue and very dazzling in the sunlight.” There was so much glare that Theodate wondered aloud, “How could the officers ever see a periscope?”
Oliver Bernard, the set designer, was standing in the Verandah Cafe leaning “lazily” against a window, looking out at the view. He saw what seemed to be the tail of a fish, well off the starboard side. Next “a streak of froth” began arcing across the surface, toward the ship.
An American woman came up beside him, and said, “That isn’t a torpedo, is it?”
“I was too spellbound to answer,” he said. “I felt absolutely sick.”
Here it was, this thing everyone had feared. “We had all been thinking, dreaming, eating, sleeping ‘submarine’ from the hour we left New York, and yet with the dreaded danger upon us, I could hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes.”
There was little fear, Bernard said. “I did not think that anybody, even women and children, were so much terrified as they were astounded and stunned by the consciousness that the fears, cherished half in ridicule for five days previous, had at last been realized. The German ‘bluff’ had actually come off.”
The track continued its approach.
THAT FIRST TURMOIL, that first bubble of foam, was the expulsion of compressed air from the submarine’s launching tube as the torpedo exited. The torpedo itself was 20 feet long and 20 inches in diameter; its nose, shaped like the top of a corn silo, contained 350 pounds of TNT and an explosive called Hexanite. Though German commanders typically set the depth at 15 feet, this one traveled at 10 feet. It moved at about 35 knots, or 40 miles an hour, powered by compressed air stored in a tank toward its nose, just behind the compartment that contained the explosives. The air rushed against the pistons in its engine, geared to spin two propellers, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, to keep the torpedo from rolling and veering. The air was then exhausted into the sea, where it bubbled to the surface. These bubbles needed a few seconds to rise, which meant the torpedo itself was always well ahead of the track that appeared above.
As the torpedo advanced, the water rushing past its nose turned a small propeller, which unscrewed a safety device that prevented detonation during storage. This propeller slipped from the nose and fell to the sea bottom, thereby exposing a triggering mechanism that upon impact with a ship’s hull would fire a small charge into the larger body of explosives. A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection.