ON TUESDAY, MAY 4, THE ADMIRALTY DECIDED IT could no longer hold the HMS Orion at Devonport but took precautions to make sure the superdreadnought made it safely to the fleet’s base at Scapa Flow.
Admiral Oliver ordered the ship to depart that night, under cover of darkness, and gave strict instructions that it sail 50 miles west past the Scilly Islands before turning north and then keep at least 100 miles out to sea for the remainder of the voyage up the Irish coast. He also assigned four destroyers—HMS Laertes, Moorsom, Myngs, and Boyne—to provide an escort until the Orion reached deep ocean.
A succession of reports to the Admiralty provided a step-by-step account of the Orion’s progress, including changes in speed. It was the most closely watched ship on the high seas.
The Admiralty’s telegraphic records show no reference made at all to the Lusitania, by now four days into its voyage and halfway across the Atlantic.
IN LONDON, at the Admiralty’s War Room, messages arrived reporting fresh submarine sightings and new attacks. On the morning of Sunday, May 2, a French ship, the Europe, was torpedoed and sunk off the Scillies. A lighthouse keeper elsewhere reported spotting a “steamer chased by submarine.” An Admiralty collier, the Fulgent, was torpedoed off the Skelling Rocks west of Ireland; nine members of its crew were rescued and landed at Galway on Monday evening. Early on the morning of Tuesday, May 4, an observer reported spotting a submarine on the surface northwest of Frenchman’s Rock in the Scillies. He watched it move east, then dive. That same morning, at 3:15 A.M., a coast watcher reported a “large sheet of flame” rising from the sea off County Mayo.
But in Room 40, Commander Hope and his code breakers heard nothing new from Kptlt. Walther Schwieger. The submarine was too far from Germany to attempt wireless communication. Room 40 could only presume that Schwieger was still on his way to his patrol zone in the Irish Sea.
It was a curious moment in the history of naval warfare. Room 40 knew a U-boat was heading south to Liverpool—knew the boat’s history; knew that it was now somewhere in the North Atlantic under orders to sink troop transports and any other British vessel it encountered; and knew as well that the submarine was armed with enough shells and torpedoes to sink a dozen ships. It was like knowing that a particular killer was loose on the streets of London, armed with a particular weapon, and certain to strike in a particular neighborhood within the next few days, the only unknown being exactly when.
The quiet meant nothing. At some point U-20 would make its presence known.