ONLY SIX OF THE LUSITANIA’S TWENTY-TWO CONVENTIONAL lifeboats got away before the ship made its final plunge; a seventh, from the port side, reached the water, but without a crucial plug. The boat filled, and foundered.
Those passengers who had already jumped from the ship swam to get as far away as possible, for fear that the ship’s descent would generate suction that would drag them down as well. This did not occur, although three passengers did experience a kindred effect. One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot. Two other passengers accompanied her into the funnel—Harold Taylor, twenty-one, also newly married, and Liverpool police inspector William Pierpoint. They too emerged alive, with blackened faces and bodies.
As the ship’s bow nosed down, its stern rose, exposing its four giant propellers, which glinted gold in the sun. By now the Lusitania was 2 miles from the point where the torpedo had struck, and about 12 miles from the Old Head of Kinsale. In these last moments, the angle of starboard list decreased to only about 5 degrees, as water filled the rest of ship.
Seaman Morton turned onto his back and watched. He saw passengers swept from the deck and hundreds of others struggling to climb toward the stern. The Lusitania again heeled to starboard and slipped from view, in “a slow, almost stately, dive by the head, at an angle of some forty-five or fifty degrees.”
Dwight Harris, floating a good distance astern in his Wanamaker’s life belt, watched as the ship “plunged forward like a knife blade into the water—funnels, masts, boats, etc., all breaking to pieces and falling about everywhere! A terrible mass of iron, wood, steam, and water! And worst of all, human forms!—A great swirling greenish white bubble formed where the ship went down, which was a mass of struggling humanity and wreckage! The bubble got bigger and bigger, and fortunately only came to within twenty or thirty yards of me shoving wreckage with it.”
THIS UPHEAVAL was a singular feature of the ship’s demise, commented upon by many survivors. The sea rose as a plateau of water that spread in all directions. It carried bodies and masses of debris, and was accompanied by a strange sound.
Charles Lauriat emerged just as the Lusitania disappeared. By kicking hard he somehow managed to free himself of the antenna wire. “As she went under,” Lauriat wrote, “I was not conscious of hearing cries; rather it was a long, lingering moan that rose, and which lasted for many moments after she disappeared.” Lauriat was overtaken by the wave. “The mass of wreckage was tremendous,” he wrote. “Aside from the people brought out with it, there were deck chairs, oars, boxes, and I can’t remember what. I simply know that one moment one was jammed between large objects, and the next moment one was under the water.”
Countless souls struggled in the sea around him. There was little he could do beyond shoving an oar or some other piece of floating debris in their direction. Many passengers wore heavy coats; women wore multiple layers of clothing—corsets, camisoles, petticoats, jumpers, furs—and all these quickly became sodden and heavy. Passengers without life jackets sank. The complicated clothing of children and infants bore them under as well.
One of the most disconcerting sights reported by survivors was of hundreds of hands waving above the water, beseeching help. But soon there was quiet. Survivors reported seeing a plume of smoke from a steamer to the south, but it came no closer. The time that had elapsed since the impact of the torpedo was eighteen minutes.
Seagulls came now and moved among the floating bodies.
CAPTAIN TURNER was still on the bridge as the navigation deck submerged. The sea in the distance was a shimmery blue, but up close, green and clear. The sun penetrating the upper strata of water caught the paint and brightwork of the deck as it fell away below him.
Helmsman Hugh Johnston saw Turner on the bridge wing, moving from port to starboard and back, wearing a life jacket but otherwise making no attempt to dodge the customary fate of a sea captain. Johnston said, later, that he’d “never met anyone as ‘cool’ ” as Turner.
The ship at that point was still moving, but slowly, with a wake full of wreckage and corpses spreading behind it, fed by the hundreds of men, women, and children who through accident or fear had remained on the ship. They streamed off like the knots in a kite’s tail.
AT 2:33 P.M., the wireless station at the Old Head of Kinsale sent the Admiralty a two-word message: “ ‘Lusitania’ sunk.”
Observers on the Old Head had seen it happen. A great ship, present one moment, gone the next, leaving what appeared at a distance to be an empty blue sea.
Captain Turner’s pocket watch, which would eventually make its way into a Liverpool museum, stopped at 2:36:15.