HIS LIFE JACKET MADE HIM BUOYANT AND LIFTED HIM from the bridge, but the descending hull pulled him under. “The whole ship seemed to be plucked from my feet by a giant hand,” Turner said. When he came back to the surface, he found himself in an archipelago of destruction and death. “Hundreds of bodies were being whirled about among the wreckage,” he said. “Men, women and children were drifting between planks, lifeboats and an indescribable litter.”
He had done all he could, he believed, and now an instinct to live ignited. He began to swim. He recognized another man nearby, William Pierpoint, the Liverpool police detective. All at once, Pierpoint disappeared. Like newlywed Margaret Gwyer, he was dragged into a funnel. “I thought he had gone,” Turner said. But in a burst of steam and hissing air, Pierpoint popped back out, his body coated with a layer of wet black soot that clung to him like enamel. At which point, Turner said, Pierpoint “started swimming for home like ten men, he was so scared.”
The ship was still moving at about 4 knots, by Turner’s estimate. But as he watched, its bow struck bottom—he was sure of it. “I noticed it because the sinking of the hull stopped for a few seconds with the stern in the air, quivering her whole length of 800 feet, and then down she went.”
It was a strange moment for a sea captain. Twenty minutes earlier Turner had stood on the bridge in command of one of the greatest ocean liners ever known. Now, still in uniform, he floated in the place where his ship had been, in a calm sea under a brilliant blue sky, no deck, cabin, or hull in sight, not even the ship’s tall masts.
He and Pierpoint swam together. Turner saw the bodies of some of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets—he counted forty in all. Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”
Turner spent three hours in the water, until he was pulled aboard a lifeboat, and later was transferred to a fishing trawler, the Bluebell.
MARGARET MACKWORTH’S first recollection, after having lost consciousness in the sea, was of awakening on the Bluebell’s deck, naked under a blanket, her teeth chattering, she wrote, “like castanets.”
A sailor appeared above her, and said, “That’s better.”
She was miffed. “I had a vague idea that something had happened but I thought that I was still on the deck of the Lusitania, and I was vaguely annoyed that some unknown sailor should be attending to me instead of my own stewardess.”
Her confusion cleared; the sailor brought her tea. With somewhat less chivalry, he told her, “We left you up here to begin with as we thought you were dead, and it did not seem worth while cumbering up the cabin with you.”
The sailor and two others helped her below decks, where she found an unexpected giddiness. “The warmth below was delicious,” she wrote; “it seemed to make one almost delirious.” Everyone around her seemed “a little drunk with the heat and the light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive. We were talking at the tops of our voices and laughing a great deal.”
She recognized the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive or not. Another survivor in the cabin believed her own husband to be dead. “It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking up of her whole life,” Mackworth wrote, “yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.”
Captain Turner did not share in the gaiety. He sat quietly by himself, in his sodden uniform.
As Mackworth watched, a woman approached Turner and began telling him about the loss of her child. Her voice was low, almost a monotone. She had placed the boy on a raft, she said. The raft then capsized, and her son was gone. In the same dispassionate manner, she told Turner that her son’s death had been unnecessary—that it was caused by the lack of organization and discipline among the crew.
THE RESCUE SHIPS reached Queenstown long after dark. The Flying Fish with Charles Lauriat aboard arrived at 9:15, the Bluebell at 11:00. The wharf was lit by gas torches that turned the evening mist a pale amber. Soldiers, sailors, and townspeople formed two lines that extended from the gangway into town. They applauded as survivors came ashore. Other soldiers waited in groups of four, with stretchers. Charles Lauriat carried one man on his back—the man with the broken leg, to whom he had spoken so rudely. The man proved to be Leonard McMurray, and this was his second shipwreck. He had survived the 1909 sinking of the White Star Line’s Republic, after a collision in fog with another liner.
Lauriat’s Thackeray drawings and the Dickens Christmas Carol were somewhere deep in the Irish Sea. He sent his wife a telegram. “I saved the baby’s pictures,” he wrote. “They were my mascot.”
He closed: “I regret your hours of suspense.”
Margaret Mackworth learned upon docking that her father was alive. She was dressed only in a blanket and asked the Bluebell’s captain for safety pins, but the idea of pins aboard a ship like his made him laugh out loud. A soldier gave her his coat, a “British Warm”; the captain gave her his slippers. She tucked the blanket around her waist to form a makeshift skirt.
She found her father waiting at the end of the gangplank. The relief and joy she felt reminded her of that time a month earlier when she had arrived in New York and seen him on the dock. As one of the first survivors to reach Queenstown, he had waited for hours as boat after boat came in, none carrying his daughter. With each successive arrival, the number of dead on board seemed to increase relative to the number of living souls. A friend said later that for a long time after this the father’s face had seemed like that of an elderly man.
Dorothy Conner, the spunky young American who had sat at Mackworth’s table and had wanted a “thrill,” came to see her the next morning, Saturday. Conner seemed unruffled, Mackworth recalled. “She was still dressed in the neat fawn tweed coat and skirt which she had had on when I saw her step off the deck the day before, and it looked as smart and well tailored as if it had just come out of the shop.”
Dwight Harris landed with his engagement ring and other jewelry still hung around his neck, and his money in his pocket. That night he found a shop that had stayed open for survivors and bought an undershirt, socks, slippers, and pajamas. He found a room in a hotel, which he shared with six other men, “and took a huge dose of whiskey before going to bed.” On Saturday morning he bought himself a suit, shirt, collar, raincoat, and cap. While doing so he happened to notice a boy of about eighteen who was asking the shopkeeper if he could have some clothes, even though he had no money to pay for them. The boy looked bereft. Harris volunteered to pay. He learned that the boy had lost his mother. “Poor fellow!” Harris wrote to his own mother. “I thank God you weren’t with me!!!”
When Theodate Pope’s ship, the Julia, arrived, a doctor was summoned to come aboard to examine her. Assisted by two soldiers, the doctor helped her down to the wharf and into a motorcar, then accompanied her to a hotel. As she stepped from the car, she collapsed onto the sidewalk. The doctor helped her inside. “I was left on a lounge in a room full of men in all sorts of strange garments while the proprietress hurried to bring me brandy,” she wrote. One of the men was the English passenger who at lunch that day had joked about not getting torpedoed before having his ice cream. He was wearing a dressing gown. Pink.
Theodate drank brandy and was helped to a room. Her face was swollen and discolored. She arranged to send her mother a telegram, one word: “Saved.”
She tried to sleep. “All night I kept expecting Mr. Friend to appear, looking for me,” she wrote. “All night long men kept coming into our rooms, snapping on the lights, bringing children for us to identify, taking telegrams, getting our names for the list of survivors, etc., etc.”
But Mr. Friend never did appear, nor did Theodate’s maid, Miss Robinson.
TURNER WALKED ashore wrapped in a blanket. He spent the night at the home of a local banker. The next morning, in his uniform, he went for a walk. He had lost his Cunard hat and stopped at a haberdasher’s shop to buy something to replace it. A survivor named Beatrice Williams, who had also been aboard the Bluebell, saw him and bristled. “You should be worrying about a hat when so many of us have lost everything we own. Why—you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
A correspondent for the New York World also encountered Turner that morning and conducted a brief interview. In a cable to his editor, the reporter wrote that the captain “appeared stunned.”
The reporter informed Turner that the bodies of a number of Americans had been recovered, including that of Broadway producer Charles Frohman, with whom Turner had spoken on the morning of the ship’s departure. Upon hearing this, Turner seemed to struggle to control his emotions.Tears filled his eyes.