ONCE OUTSIDE NEW YORK HARBOR, THE LUSITANIA accelerated, but Captain Turner did not yet order its cruising speed. He first had a rendezvous to make, after the ship exited American territorial waters, and it was pointless to waste the coal necessary to reach top speed when he soon would have to bring the ship to a complete stop.
The ship’s decks grew markedly cooler, subject now to the winds of the open Atlantic and the breeze generated by the ship’s own forward motion. Some passengers still lingered at the rails to watch the coastline recede, but most went inside to settle into their accommodations and unpack their belongings. Older children roamed the decks, making friends and testing out various means of recreation, including, yes, shuffleboard on the top deck. Younger children—at least those in first and second class—met the stewardesses who would tend to them during the voyage and occupy them while their parents dined in their respective dining rooms.
Theodate Pope, the architect-spiritualist, and her companion, Edwin Friend, went to the ship’s first-class reading and writing room, part of which was reserved for women, but which also served as the ship’s library, to which men also had access. It was a large but comfortable place that spanned the width of A Deck, the ship’s topmost level, and was fitted with writing desks and chairs. Its walls were covered with pale silk in soft gray and cream. Silk curtains in a pinkish hue called Rose du Barry hung at its windows. The carpet was a soft rose. Men had exclusive use of a separate similarly sized chamber farther back on A Deck, called the Smoking Room, paneled in walnut.
Theodate found a copy of that morning’s Sun, a New York newspaper, and began to read.
The paper devoted a good deal of attention to a visit that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had made to New York the previous day. He had taken time off from foreign concerns to speak at a rally at Carnegie Hall, in support of a campaign by evangelist Billy Sunday to persuade people to renounce alcohol, and to sign a pledge of “total abstinence.” For a previous talk on the subject, in Philadelphia, Secretary Bryan had drawn an overflow crowd of 16,000 people. The organizers in New York expected a similar crush at the hall. It didn’t happen. Only about 2,500 people showed up, leaving about a third of the house empty. Bryan wore a black suit, a black alpaca coat, and his black string tie. At the end of his talk, toasting the audience, he raised a glass—of ice water. Booker T. Washington, newly turned fifty-nine, got up to speak as well and signed one of Billy Sunday’s pledge cards.
Another item, this out of Washington, reported President Wilson’s unhappiness at the fact that critics continued to take him to task for allowing the film The Clansman, by D. W. Griffith, to be screened at the White House. It was May now; the screening had taken place on February 18, with Wilson, his daughters, and members of the cabinet in attendance. Based on the novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, which was subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the film described the purported evils of the Reconstruction era and painted the Klan as the heroic savior of newly oppressed white southerners. The film, or “photoplay,” as it was called, had become a huge hit nationwide, though its critics, in particular the six-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, decried its content and held protests outside movie theaters, prompting Griffith to give the film a more palatable name, The Birth of a Nation. On Friday, April 30, the president’s personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, had issued a statement saying, “The President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it.” Wilson had agreed to the showing, Tumulty said, as a “courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”
And of course, there was the latest news of the war. A German drive against the Russians along the Baltic Sea had gained ground; back-and-forth fighting in Champagne and along the Meuse had gained nothing. German troops reinforced their position in the Ypres Salient. In Van Province, the Turks renewed their attacks against Armenian civilians; far to the west, Allied forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula were said to have routed the Turks, though this account would shortly be proven inaccurate. There was also a brief report about the bombing of the American ship Cushing.
THEODATE LOATHED the war. She saw Germany as wholly at fault and rejected German attempts to shift blame to Britain. “Whatever else could they expect when they have insulted England for years, and she is now simply and honorably keeping her agreement with the Triple Alliance?” Theodate wrote, referring to England’s intervention in defense of Belgian neutrality. She longed for a crushing Allied victory that would leave Germany blasted “beyond recognition.” She did not want the United States to get involved, however. The preceding October she had heard from a spirit medium, an acquaintance, who claimed to have received a message from the beyond: “Under no circumstances, whatever, should the United States participate belligerently in the European conflict.” Theodate had forwarded the message to President Wilson.
What most caught Theodate’s attention in Saturday’s Sun was an item at the top of page 1, about the German Embassy’s warning. This was the first she had heard of it. The only warning of any kind that she had seen thus far was in the “Information for Passengers” brochure she had received from Cunard after buying her ticket, which named her fellow first-class travelers and included this notice: “Passengers are informed that Professional Gamblers are reported as frequently crossing on Atlantic Steamers, and are warned to take precautions accordingly.”
The Sun cast the German announcement in benign terms, under the headline “Germany Moves to Stop Tours Abroad.” The item included the text of the warning, calling it the first step in a campaign by Germany “to head off American travel to Europe during the coming summer.”
Theodate told Friend about it and said, “That means of course that they intend to get us.” She was certain, however, that when the Lusitania reached British waters it would receive an escort. The prospect gave her comfort.
NELLIE HUSTON, thirty-one years old and on her way back to England after nearly a year staying with her aunt and uncle in Chicago, began a long letter to a woman named Ruth, which she planned to continue writing throughout the voyage. It was full of chatty details. She was traveling in second class and noted how crowded it was because of the additional passengers from the Cameronia—so crowded that the breakfast service had been divided into two sittings. She complained that she had been assigned to the first, at 7:30 A.M., which meant she would have to get up each morning at 7:00. She noted as well that the day was surprisingly cold and that she was glad she had brought her heavy coat.
A lot of her friends and family knew she was sailing that day on the Lusitania. “My!” she wrote. “The mail I got today. The steward who was giving it out was amused. He said it might be my birthday.” Friends and relatives had sent her letters and gifts. “I had a pair of silk stockings from Prue and a piece of silk from Aunt Ruth and a rose. I had cards from Nellie Casson, Will Hobson, Tom, Edith Klaas and a nice letter from Lu which I’m going to answer.”
Some were concerned about her voyage. “I’m so surprised to hear that Will and Bee cried, I didn’t think it would worry them.” She herself hated to cry, but, she wrote, “I’ve felt like doing it quite a lot since I’ve left.”
UPON ENTERING international waters, Turner slowed the ship. In the distance, three large vessels materialized from the haze. These were British warships, stationed there to keep the Vaterland and the other German liners locked in New York Harbor. Turner ordered “full astern” to bring theLusitania to a complete stop.
Two of the three ships were cruisers, HMS Bristol and Essex; the third was the Caronia, a Cunard liner converted to military use and now heavily armed. Turner had once been its captain. The two cruisers lay off the Lusitania’s starboard side, the Caronia off the port, each at a distance of about a “cable’s length,” equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile, or roughly 600 feet. All three warships lowered a small boat, and the sailors in each began rowing toward the Lusitania, through “swirling mist-veils,” as Capt. James Bisset, the Caronia’s master, recalled. The boats carried mail bound for England. “There was scarcely a breeze to ruffle the surface of the ocean,” Bisset wrote. “A light mist clung around the ships, like a shroud.”
Bisset spotted Captain Turner on the bridge, and Staff Captain Anderson. He knew the two men well. Some years earlier Bisset had served under both as junior third officer on the Umbria, an older passenger liner.
Turner and Anderson stepped out onto the port-side wing of the bridge and waved to the officers on the Caronia’s bridge. Everyone seemed to know one another, having served under, beside, or over one another through the years. After Turner and Anderson went back inside the bridge, theLusitania’s second officer, Percy Hefford, appeared on the port wing. “He was a special friend of mine,” Bisset recalled. Before both joined Cunard, they had served together on an ancient tramp steamer. The thing Hefford had wanted most was to serve aboard the Lusitania. “Now, there he was,” Bisset wrote.
The two men used their arms to semaphore greetings and good-byes.
“Cheerio!”
“Good luck!”
“Good voyage!”
After the boats pulled away to return to their respective ships, Captain Turner gave the order for maximum speed. Full ahead. The Lusitania’s giant propellers raised a Niagara of water at the stern, and the ship began to move. Turner sounded his foghorn three times, the “Sailor’s Farewell.”
Ordinarily, all the Lusitania’s furnaces and boilers would be fully engaged during a crossing, with all four funnels belching smoke, but the war had caused a decline in travel so dramatic that Cunard had been compelled to seek cost reductions wherever it could find them. Turner was under orders issued the preceding November to run the ship using only three of its four boiler rooms, for a savings of 1,600 tons of coal per trip. But this also reduced the ship’s maximum speed by 16 percent, from 25 knots to 21, ironic considering the ship’s original mandate. Though seemingly a modest reduction, it nonetheless cut the distance the Lusitania could travel each day by 100 nautical miles, adding one full day to a transatlantic crossing.
A man aboard one of the warships took a photograph, believed to be the last ever taken of the Lusitania, which showed the ship steaming off into the mist-shrouded Atlantic, smoke pouring from just three funnels. Cunard did not publicize the change, and few, if any, passengers knew it had been made.